


Fangorn Wood

by The Lauderdale (TheLauderdale)



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, Winnie-the-Pooh - A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh - All Media Types
Genre: Adventure, Crossover, Gen, Horror, Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-17 09:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 65,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4660866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLauderdale/pseuds/The%20Lauderdale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Pooh," said Piglet, "Orcs are certainly one of the Fiercer Animals. Much, much fiercer than Kangas."<br/>Pooh made a noise of agreement.<br/>"But they also seem very Sad to me," said Piglet. "All that Running and Fighting, and the Bosses, and the Big Whips."<br/>"I know, Piglet," said Pooh. "It really doesn't sound very nice."<br/>Piglet nodded. "Pooh?" he said after a moment.<br/>"Yes, Piglet?"<br/>"We have to tell Rabbit, don't we."</p><p>----</p><p>In which Orcs come to the Hundred Acre Wood. Not all of the Orcs who captured Merry and Pippin died outside of Fangorn Forest. When some of the survivors find each other after the rout, Mauhúr is determined to bring news back to Isengard, even if it means facing the unknown dangers of Fangorn.</p><p>Then things get weird.</p><p>A <em>Lord of the Rings</em>/<em>Winnie-the-Pooh</em> crossover.  Both fandoms are book-based.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which an Orc of Mordor Falls To a Spear of Rohan, and Two Small Halflings Make Their Escape.

When Grishnákh, pressing down upon the two Halflings in the grass, drew his sword it was not to slay them. That would have forfeited all.

Men in the dark! Filthy horse boys, stinking of the beasts they rode. _They will not take the little ones_ , he thought, and there was no tenderness in his mind. The Halflings were only dear to him for what they knew, and for what they might carry. It was as that great ape Uglúk said: alive and unspoiled, and those orders the same for both of them, even if they did serve different Masters.

But his sword betrayed him as it cleared its scabbard with a glinting _snik_ ; there was a whistling sound close by, and then—

In the bowels of Lugbúrz, where the clang of steel and the shrieking machinery drowned out the screams of Men and Orcs, where Grishnákh had plied his trade as a torturer with rack and screw, with hammer and tongs and with long knives, the blood on his hands was never his. He was not prepared for this fierce white pain.

An Arrow. In His Hand.

He dropped the sword and screamed.

One of the riders turned his head to see a dark shape leap out of the grass: with a powerful movement he urged his horse around and gave pursuit, and when he leveled his spear his aim was beautiful and true, passing through the Orc's body. It fell and the man rode on.

A second horseman rode on hard behind the first. His horse cleared the two small hobbits lying low in the grass, but it did not miss Grishnákh. A hard hoof came down with smashing force on the Orc’s elbow, shattering his long arm. By now he was not feeling much, incoherent agony giving way to the numbing effects of shock as his body shut down part of his brain, tried to spare him the worst of it.

_So I’ve failed_ , he thought, and the thought was emotionless, with no compelling, familiar fuel of fury or hatred or dread. How strange that he should recognize these emotions only in their absence. His senses left him one by one as he drifted…

-.-.-.-

“…if only we had our legs and hands free, we might get away. But I can’t touch the knots—“

_What is that squeaking voice?_ thought Grishnákh absently. One of the Halfling filth? Then they were still alive…

“No need to try. I was going to tell you: I’ve managed to free my hands. These loops are only left for show.”

Was that the way of it? These creatures might not seem terribly intelligent or strong, but they were clearly more resourceful than they had looked. If Grishnákh had been in better condition he might have roused himself, tried to reclaim or recapture them, but he seemed to have little control over either his body or even his own will. And so he could only lie there listening.

The two little hobbits were still sitting close by in the dark and were evidently eating some sort of food that one of them had kept concealed about its person. After a time the livelier of the two crawled forward in the grass and Grishnákh could sense it feeling about his prone body. Cunning hands found and slipped out the knife he wore belted at his hip. If it felt that he still lived it gave no sign: surely if it had it would have killed him where he lay, but most likely it could not detect the faint movement of his breathing through his heavy leather clothing. In the darkness it cut through the last of its own bindings and those of its friend, and after that Grishnákh heard them little, and then not at all.


	2. In Which a Small Company of Survivors Find Each Other In the Forest of Fangorn, and News Comes of the Fate of Uglúk.

Shagrub ran. His mouth was hanging open and when he stumbled on his own feet and fell he bit his tongue very badly, but he sprang up and ran again without stopping, only a long whimper escaping from him as he went. Behind him Men were riding, riding with the red Sun on them and hewing Orcs with their cruel weapons. Shagrub did not want to die. The others said the Forest was treacherous, but he did not care. If death was before him it was most assuredly behind him as well, and he feared the arrows and swords of the Rohirrim and the plunging hooves of their battle steeds more than the unknown perils of Fangorn.

The Uruk-hai had stayed behind to fight. A great Man among the Men had dismounted from his steed to fight the mighty Uglúk, but Shagrub was not looking back. He was no Uruk, no great warrior, but a goblin of the Misty Mountains. He had come down from the North like many of his kin for killing and revenge, but he was not ready to die for it.

These Uruk-hai, what were they thinking? _We will kill for the lord of Isengard. We will die for the lord of Isengard_. He had heard those two phrases more than he cared to remember in the days he had been among their company. Not, to his mind, the most encouraging or seductive of mottos. _Fools_ , Grishnákh and his lot had called Uglúk and his kind, and that was more along Shagrub’s own way of thinking, but then that Mordor rabble were no better by his reckoning.

He could not relate to the compulsion that either group labored under. Goblins were a disparate, masterless breed: disunited strongholds under petty chieftains. The great bosses of the past were behind them, Azog and Bolg long ago food for carrion crows. Now Mordor called as the great Eye set a yearning on all Orcs to travel southward, a primal urge encoded in the earliest days of their making, but Shagrub did not go and neither had many other goblins.

You felt the tug strongest when you woke and just before you went to sleep, calling you to make the journey in those moments when you were most vulnerable. Sometimes it was even tempting to follow, but resistance _was_ possible even so, and cowardice is a marvelous tool for strengthening one’s resolve. While the Uruk-hai and the other bigger Orcs listened and went to their masters, the goblins were the least likely to obey. The race of goblins boasts many cowards.

Shagrub clung tightly, lovingly, to his cowardice. Cowards might receive little respect, but he could see no other downside to his fear, for it had kept him alive in many grim and evil circumstances. It would serve him still, he hoped, in the forest of Fangorn.

-.-.-.-

Two hours later he was no longer so sure this had been a good idea. He stood pressed back against a tall elm tree, an Isengard-forged broadsword at his throat, while a tall Uruk stared at him down the haft. “Shall I kill him, Mauhúr?” asked Noglash, his eyes filled with a burning fire.

“Name and number,” said Mauhúr, standing close by Noglash as they looked down at the cowering snaga before them.

“Shagrub…I never had a number…I was with F’narg and the rest of the mountain party— _ai_ , that hurts…” He could feel the black blade pricking at the hollow of his throat. It pressed in just a little and he could feel the hot trickle of blood over his collar bone.

There was a responsive warm wet trickle down the leg of his trousers. Noglash’s eyes flicked downward and then back at Shagrub’s face. He smiled viciously.

Mauhúr, in comparison, looked at Shagrub steadily. He had pale gray eyes, unusual for an Orc, and they were queer and difficult to fathom. “He’s just another little goblin deserter, like the others,” he said at last in clear, gruff Common. “Stand down, Noglash. We can’t kill all of them.

“I don’t see why not,” said Noglash, but he lowered his sword obediently. “Get over with the others, little rat, before you crap yourself as well.”

Shagrub needed no further urging: he hurriedly joined the other goblin-Orcs he saw, who sat together in their little knot of three. One he recognized, and Reznib’s eyes widened to see him as well. “Shagrub! You’re alive.”

“Barely,” said Shagrub, feeling his throat. “But for how long? Who are these fellows? I don’t remember seeing them from before.”

“Jashit, who is from Mirkwood parts, and Gobsnud. They’re like us: they saw what was happening out there and got out while they could.”

“Struck for the trees,” said Gobsnud, eyes bulging out of his head a little. “We should never have come in here. You saw it. You saw what they did.”

“They were killing us out there,” said Shagrub. “I wasn’t going to stick around to let them use _me_ for target practice.”

“He ain’t talking about the Men,” said Reznib, jerking his head toward Jashit.

“It was the trees,” said Jashit with a shudder of remembered horror. “There was more than me and Gobsnud when we came into this wood, but the trees…you don’t want to know all that we’ve seen.”

Shagrub stared at the two unfamiliar Orcs, Jashit and Gobsnud, and looked back to Reznib as well. Reznib looked disturbed as he said, “I don’t know what I saw. I won’t say certain what it is I saw. But _they_ say what they saw was a tree…uproot itself, and kill poor Urgat. Swat him like a little black fly. And another tree ATE some big Uruk fellow named Nulak.”

“ _Lies_ ,” exclaimed Noglash, rounding on them suddenly. “You pathetic snaga, you’re all alike. Cowardly little rats, spreading nasty stories to scare yourselves and your vermin friends with. Wretched scum!” He started toward them as to cut them down, but one of the other Uruk-hai put a quick hand on his shoulder and he subsided, staring at them with still-bulging eyes for a moment longer before turning his back on them with a noise of disgust.

But Jashit was mouthing something at Shagrub, and when he leaned in Jashit whispered rapidly in his hairy ear: “He saw. Noglash saw. We were with him when it happened. Nulak was a mate of his.”

“Best stay clear of Noglash. He’s unsettled, and he’s angry,” murmured Reznib. “He’ll spit you up and put you out for the crows to peck at your eyes…”

No need for anyone to tell Shagrub that. He jerked his head toward the Uruk-hai. “Well, what about this lot, then?” he whispered. “Granted, it’s hard to tell these Isengard folk apart from one another, but I don’t recall any of these lads’ faces.”

“That’s Mauhúr and his boys, Mauhúr what that Uglúk kept going on about, d’you remember? And those are his lads, what’s left of them at any rate. They were there in the woods to reinforce us, but you can see there’s but a handful of them left. The Riders gave ’em a proper spanking, didn’t they, and drove ’em back into the trees without any supper.” There was a tone of bitter amusement in Reznib’s whisper. None of the big Uruk-hai liked the goblin-Orcs very much and the feeling was entirely mutual.

Meanwhile, Mauhúr and the Uruk-hai under him were still conferring. “We should have stuck it out,” said one of them. “Might be we could’ve killed one of their big bosses. That fellow with the hayseed hair…”

“They all had yellow hair, Durzlip. How does that narrow it down any?” snapped Noglash.

“Be calm, Noglash,” said Mauhúr in a voice that brooked no further displays of aggression. “I saw the one he was talking about, that one with the white horse tail pluming from his helmet…and it may be you are right, Durzlip: we _might_ have stuck it out and accomplished something. But we didn’t, because I gave the order to fall back, and if I hadn’t done that, we should most likely have died on our feet like those other good soldier boys. And what then, eh? We were sent to help Uglúk, not do his work for him…well, there’s no helping Uglúk now, and Sharkey needs to be told what happened. That means we’re the ones who have to leg it back to Isengard and tell him.”

“Go back and tell Sharkey?” Warrung blanched. He was big, powerfully built even for one of the Uruk-hai, and doughty under most circumstances, but this was a prospect that even he found intimidating.

“Yes, go back and tell him,” said Mauhúr. “Or be marked the rest of our lives with his disfavor, as deserters and turnabouts. We wear his Hand. It would go ill with us to incur the wrath of a wizard as powerful as him.”

“Unless we WANT to wake up spitting toads every morning for the rest of our lives,” said Noglash grimly.

“Well, what would you have us to do, then?” demanded Durzlip. “Wait till dark and make our way out of these woods again and back across the Westemnet? Those horse boys are still out there, looking to carve pretty holes in any of us that they can find. And even if they aren’t, that just means they’re sitting up by Isengard, waiting to cut us down before we ever reach Orthanc. The game is up, that’s what: they know what Sharkey’s up to now, and they know that we’re his lads. Sure as flies on a sheep’s tail they know where we plan to go and they’ll be waiting for us.”

He looked around him fiercely, as if waiting to see if any of them would gainsay him, but nobody spoke up. The silence lengthened. At length the subordinate Uruk-hai looked to Mauhúr, who was not looking at any of them. He had folded his arms across his chest and lifted his gaze to the green leaves overhead, clearly deep in thought.

“There’s one place we know the Rohirrim will not go,” he said finally. “They will not come in here under the eaves of Fangorn. We won’t leave the Forest: we will go _through_ Fangorn until we reach Isengard.”

-.-.-.-

“Through Fangorn? We are going to die. We are all of us going to die…”

“Tell him to shut up or I’ll have his tongue out,” growled Noglash.

“Quiet, Gobsnud,” said Jashit, putting his arm around the Mirkwood goblin’s shoulders and giving him a squeeze, but Gobsnud kept muttering to himself and nothing would silence him, whether words of menace or of comfort.

Shagrub trudged along silently, wondering if Gobsnud was right and they were, in fact, all going to die. Unlike the other goblins, he had not seen one of these Orc-eating trees for himself and he didn’t know what to think of the whole business. It sounded like a story, that was all, like something someone had thought up to frighten young Orclings. He had no love for trees – what Orc does? – but trees that moved and swatted people or ate them…it was just hard to picture, that was all.

“Did it have teeth?” he asked Jashit. “The one that ate Nulak?” When the answer he got was just a shake of the head, he said, “What about eyes?”

“I didn’t look at it,” said Jashit. “That is, I saw it, but after that I was too busy running away to think of getting a closer look.”

“Me too,” said Reznib.

“I’m keeping a lookout, then,” decided Shagrub. “If a tree is going to eat me I at least want to see it first. How often do you have the chance to see a thing like that?”

An angry outburst from Noglash behind them convinced him it was better to keep his peace for a while. Probably just as well. His tongue was sore from biting it earlier and he was still spitting out blood from time to time. His trousers were also damp from his earlier humiliation. All in all, it was an uncomfortable sort of journey.

Shagrub tried to be philosophical about it. Certainly things could be worse. He could be smoldering on a Rohirrim bonfire right now, or lying in the long grass of the Westemnet with an arrow in his gut. And then there were his surroundings, which were not as distasteful as he might have expected. As they journeyed deeper into Fangorn the leaves became denser and thicker overhead. Eventually there were no more open patches of sunlight and it was dark beneath the trees, and reassuringly stifling and airless. With a little imagination their thick trunks became the pillars of Moria, and Shagrub traveled within the subterranean security of the stony earth.

Thinking of it that way made it all somewhat bearable, as did the knowledge of the certain discomfort of the Uruk-hai, which was plain enough anyhow from their grumblings (all except Mauhúr, who, if he felt any misgivings about his decision at this point, did not see fit to share them.) They had been bred to endure the sun and to see well in daylight. The darkness beneath the thick leafy canopy of Fangorn was certainly not for the likes of _them_.

He stared ahead of him at the heels of Reznib, who walked before him, and of Durzlip, who walked before Reznib. All in a little train they were, and Mauhúr at the front. The great Captain Mauhúr. If he knew where he was taking them, he hadn’t seen fit to share it with the snaga. Just conscripted them for this little romp through Fangorn and left no room for any of them to decline the invitation. Well, Shagrub was along for the moment—sometimes it is good to have someone Big take the lead—but the minute it looked like there was going to be any trouble, he planned on bolting. He wasn’t in Saruman’s service, nor that of anyone else neither. Shagrub’s first allegiance, now and always, was to himself.

Although, looking at the get-up these big Uruk-hai had on, he could see why it might be useful to find such a master. The wizard equipped his lackeys nicely, with great bolted shields and large well-made swords, and all manner of other fine swag. They even had proper full metal greaves (Noglash’s had cruel spike-things sticking out of his, which made Jashit keep up a sprightly pace to avoid a good pricking), while Shagrub and his fellow goblins had only padded leather. If Saruman had room for a few smaller fellows, Shagrub thought he might not mind entering the wizard’s employ for a brief time. Just long enough make off with some of the equipage…

He was thinking these thoughts, not paying much heed to what was going on around him, when Mauhúr and Durzlip both stopped suddenly. Reznib managed to avoid walking into Durzlip, but stumbled forward shortly as Shagrub, Gobsnud and Jashit plowed into him from behind. Durzlip turned around, an angry look on his face, but Mauhúr put up his hand sharply to forestall any sound from the Orcs behind him. He didn’t even turn around, striking a listening attitude.

“There is something moving up ahead of us…” he said after a short span of time. “Come Warrung, your ears are better than the rest of ours.”

Warrung waded through the milling goblin-Orcs, hand flexing on the leather grip of his large sword. He stood next to Mauhúr as both Uruk-hai listened. “It’s a strange sound,” he said. “Like a groaning, coming up out of the earth. As if something were pulling up out of the—” His eyes widened.

Mauhúr didn’t need to hear anything further. “We run,” he said sharply. “Now!”

This was not advice that required repeating, and it coincided nicely with Shagrub’s own plans. He immediately darted sideways, away from the group—

—only to be brought up short, scrabbling at the collar of his tunic as something caught him from behind and jerked him—

_—UP—_

Shagrub thought that surely he must have been grabbed up by one of those killer trees, and he shut his eyes immediately. He had realized all at once that he no longer had any interest in seeing what it was that killed him. Let it be a mystery. But when he didn’t die immediately and only felt a repeated painful jolting throughout his body he opened his eyes, mouth opening and shutting ineffectually as his fingers continued plucking at the constriction of his throat. Around him the earth jounced angrily, _ground-leaves-sky-trees_ , the running legs of Uruk-hai and particularly the dark legs of Noglash, who seemed to be carrying him.

Shagrub’s throat felt as if it were caught in a vice, strangled in the collar of his tunic as he swung from Noglash’s hand to be smashed repeatedly against the Uruk’s hard thigh. He try to cry out, to shout at Noglash to let him go—more that that, he wanted to BREATHE—but as it was he couldn’t even gasp.

Goblins have strong constitutions for their size, but Shagrub’s vision was beginning to darken—it must have been over a minute since any air had entered his lungs – when he felt himself thrown forward violently through the air. Had he been in a better state he might have formed himself into a ball to protect himself somewhat from the impact: instead he hit hard, body impacting with the ground at great speed. It would have dashed the breath from his body, if he had had any left. As it was he lay there, gasping for air like a dying frog, and it took him a little time before he was able to turn onto his side.

He soon wished he hadn’t as a heavy boot planted itself in his belly, doubling him over.

“Run will you, you little runt? Use the first bit of trouble and you try to get away from us, is that it? Maggot! Dung!”

Each exclamation came accompanied by an equally furious kick from Noglash. Shagrub gave a sound somewhere between a squeal and a wail as he tried desperately to scrabble away from the Uruk’s assault. His clothing was all of heavy coarse material but Noglash’s boot was shod with steel, and tough leather and burlap padding alone were not protection against this onslaught.

“Leave it, Noglash! We need to listen!”

The Uruk gave him one last fierce kick before leaving off, swearing as he rejoined the other Uruk-hai in looking back the way they had come.

A claw on his shoulder, and Reznib was crouched over him. “Are you all right? What a fool you were, trying to run like that! I told you Noglash is in no mood for it. In any case we need to stay together. We can’t afford to be separated in this place: none of us will last long on our own, don’t you understand?”

He was patting Shagrub all over, evidently trying to establish the extent of Shagrub’s injuries, though he might just have been feeling Shagrub over to see if the hurt goblin had anything worth nicking. Shagrub was in too much pain to be concerned about that. Besides, he would have offered sore pickings for anyone looking to steal from him just then. His boots were little more than scraps of leather held together with tightly wound burlap, and he had lost his sword in that fiasco of an engagement outside of Fangorn. All he had to his name were his nails and teeth, and a rusted old dagger (which he mercifully hadn’t hurt himself on when Noglash threw him), and a battered and much dented helmet he wore hung at his waist because it was difficult to see out of (which he _had_.)

All things considered, Shagrub was not a prime target for thieves.

Reznib helped him to sit upright and Shagrub, wincing at the fresh new lot of welts and bruises that would soon mottle the gray skin beneath his clothing, looked around. The Uruk-hai were off in their clutch again, his tormenter Noglash among them, while the goblins were gathered in their own small and pathetically ineffectual (even to Shagrub’s mind) group. Gobsnud looked, if anything, worse off that Shagrub. Why that should be Shagrub had no idea, because no one had been kicking _him_ , but his eyes were wide with terror, the black pupils fully dilated as he stared around him. He looked ready to scream or pass out or both.

“We won’t leave this place alive,” he whimpered over and over, shoulders hunched and hands closed and unclosing at his side.

As Reznib helped Shagrub to his feet and he was able to get a better look at their surroundings, Shagrub felt his heart fall within him. “We’re back where we started, aren’t we?” he said in a painful wheeze. It hurt just to talk, let alone try to point, so he nodded his head in the direction he wanted them to look. “See that elm!”

His fellow goblins immediately saw the marks in the soft earth at the base of the tree: disturbed soil that his own feet had kicked up, and the deep prints of Noglash’s heavy boots. It was the same tree the Uruk had backed Shagrub up against, not an hour ago.

“Fine progress this,” Shagrub said bitterly. “We know now what it is going to be from here out. Stop and start…forward three and fall back seven… Good luck on us ever getting further than this, much less reaching where we’re trying to get to. We’ll be trapped in here forever.”

Gobsnud uttered a little moan and sank down on his knees, covering his face. Had he been able, he would probably have wept.

Jashit was not in the same state of helplessness as Gobsnud, but he looked glum enough for all that. “I should never have left Mirkwood,” he said plainly, looking at the three of them in turn.

Substitute the Misty Mountains for Mirkwood, and this was a sentiment that Shagrub could agree with wholeheartedly.

“Well,” came a quiet, evil voice. “Here is a pretty sight.” Noglash cried out sharply and immediately all four Uruk-hai, who had still been locked in heated conference, turned. In short order they had placed themselves between the goblins and the newcomer and were advancing upon him, while he watched them approach with baleful eyes. “Lose your way in the big woods, did you? Where is it you were trying to get to, I wonder?”

“Enough of that. Who are you?” asked Mauhúr.

“He’s Orc, Mauhúr, but beyond that I can’t say,” said Warrung, sword at the ready, looking at the dark figure with an uneasy gaze. “There is something funny about him, but I can’t sniff out just what it is exactly.”

“You’re Grishnákh!” Reznib blurted out as, like Shagrub, he recognized the newcomer. “Then you survived as well?”

“So it would seem,” he said sardonically. “And you as well, it appears.” This last seemed directed, not at Reznib, but toward the Uruk-hai, two of whom had placed themselves behind him while Mauhúr and Warrung faced him head on. “What will your wizard say, I wonder, when he knows you did not even have the good manners to die for his cause?”

“I have nothing I need to account for,” said Mauhúr mildly, “and certainly not to the likes of you. I have never seen you before, and you carry no shield, but that is a red Eye of Mordor around your neck, is it not? You’re a long way from your master’s domain, friend.”

“I go where the Eye commands,” said Grishnákh coldly as his hand went up to hold the token on its leather thong. “Nor is it for the likes of _you_ to question me, nor yet detain or do me injury.” This last was spoken with a narrow glance at Noglash, who was clearly itching to plant a blade in him.

“There is no injury offered,” said Mauhúr. His unspoken “yet” was clear to all who heard him. “But you _will_ bear detention, _and_ questioning. I’d like to know your business here, and how you come to be in this wood.”

Grishnákh’s lip curled back in a snarl, but he seemed to know well enough that he was outnumbered. And, perhaps, he had other reasons of his own to remain in their company. He had announced his presence to them, after all: it was he who had found them and not the other way around. Shagrub had the distinct impression that he was after information of his own.

“I am looking for something,” the Mordor Orc said with chill brevity, “that my Master has lost. It may be I will find it in this forest.”

“Those are cryptic words,” said Mauhúr. “You speak much and little at the same time, but you will speak more clearly before we go any further. _You_ ,” he said, looking fiercely at Reznib. “You said you recognize this Orc?”

“I…did, yes,” said Reznib as two pairs of eyes came to rest squarely upon him: Mauhúr’s, seeking explanation, and Grishnákh’s, promising that Reznib would regret ever having mentioned the other Orc’s name or in any way indicating that he knew who Grishnákh was.

In short order it came out, between Mauhúr’s questioning of reluctant Reznib and grudging Grishnákh, that Uglúk’s party of Uruk warriors had captured two small Man-people – Halflings – just as the wizard Saruman had commanded. Following Uglúk’s orders, they had been returning to Isengard by the shortest road and had made rapid progress, but then there had been trouble from the mounted Rohirrim near the southernmost part of Fangorn Forest.

Mauhúr’s face gave away little, but Durzlib, Noglash and Warrung all exchanged glances at this revelation. Waiting in the woods to reinforce Uglúk’s numbers, they had not been aware of Uglúk’s successful capture of the Halflings. This was astonishingly good news, or would have been if the small creatures were still safely captives of mighty Uglúk. But the Halflings had been lost in the fighting outside of Fangorn, and Grishnákh himself did not know what had become of them.

“My hope,” he said, “is that they have escaped somehow and made their way into Fangorn. That is why I am here. I am trying to track them down and retrieve them.”

“How would they have escaped?” asked Durzlip from behind, puzzled and suspicious of this explanation. “You said that they were bound when last you saw them: bound hand and foot in the middle of camp.”

“I was not always with them, though,” said Grishnákh, looking at him with a hooded expression, “and nor were their guards. There was an attack on the eastern side of the knoll where we were camped: some good lads were killed and many of us – Uglúk and myself included – had to dash off to stop the rest from running away in a panic. No one remained to guard the Halflings, and when I myself went back later they were no longer there. But in the meantime the filthy Horse Boys had gone riding through our camp at their leisure, churning up the grass and soil and dropping their horse apples everywhere and leaving all a mess of blood and bodies. So I do not know when the little rats went missing or how they came to disappear. I only found…”

He trailed off, looking around at them all as if he didn’t trust them one bit.

“Found what?” asked Mauhúr.

“You’ll tell us now if you know what’s good for you,” Noglash threatened close by Grishnákh’s pointed ear.

Grishnákh gave him no response, but put his hand into the folds of his malodorous garment and withdrew his closed fist. As the others leaned in to see better, he opened it. There was a piece of hempen cord in his horny hand, of particularly coarse Orkish make. The sight was greeted with muttering from the Uruk-hai. Grishnákh did not protest as Mauhúr took the cord from his hand.

“This rope was cut,” said Mauhúr, looking at it closely.

“Well, it certainly wasn’t chewed,” Grishnákh said with deadpan sarcasm, which Mauhúr ignored.

“Where would they have found a blade?” asked Noglash, while their leader gave the cord over to Warrung for the master tracker to have a look.

“The question, I think, is whether they freed themselves or had some help,” Durzlip opined.

Warrung brought the piece of rope to his nose and sniffed. “What do you think, Warrung?” Mauhúr asked him as the big Uruk stood in silent sniffing contemplation.

“It isn’t exactly like anything I’ve smelt before,” he said thoughtfully, winding the cord through his clawed fingers. “Like Man, but not alike to Man entirely. I will recognize it if I come across it again.

Grishnákh coughed; Mauhúr gave him a look but nodded assent to Warrung, who handed the cord back to Grishnákh. “So you are tracking these Halflings,” Mauhúr said. “You don’t think they were carried off by the Riders?”

“That I cannot know. I do not have the nose your friend here seems to have, but I thought I smelt them about the eaves of Fangorn, and since lingering near the Horse Boys was not an attractive option, I decided to look for them in the Forest.”

“Were you there long? Did you see what happened to Uglúk?” Mauhúr asked.

“I saw,” said Grishnákh. Looking around to see that he had their full attention, he went on: “The Sun rose in the East and with it the Men began to sing, and they led a fresh charge. There were many arrows and finally the Uruk-hai broke and ran, and Uglúk was at their head. He was making his way to Fangorn, and I thought to wait and see if they would reach its Eaves.”

“This I saw as well,” said Mauhúr, nodding, “though we were clearly in a different part of the forest’s periphery.”

Grishnákh nodded as well, then went on, “The Horsemen wheeled around them and came between them and the Forest, and I faded back into the trees and watched. One of the Men descended from his horse, a tall man with a white horse tail pluming from his helmet, and he fought with Uglúk face to face, as though he did him some great honor. But it was no fair match. He’d had the ease of riding horseback though the night, while Uglúk had fought and run afoot and fought again throughout. He was weary, so the Man had the better of him. Uglúk fell, and the rest of his lads were dispatched quickly and bloodily, from the last Uruk to the least goblin. And that is all I can tell you of them.”

“It’s enough,” said Mauhúr. None of them mourned the passing of Uglúk, but Mauhúr had respected him, and Uglúk’s death certainly did not benefit him or any of the others. He was silent for a moment, and what thoughts he may have had he did not share. Grishnákh too was silent, though he watched Mauhúr with a keen gaze.

During Mauhúr’s questioning of Reznib and of Grishnákh, Shagrub had not been idle. He had gone apart from the others, leaning his sore body against a tree and retrieving a bolt of burlap from his pack. Unwinding a length of the material, he sawed through it clumsily with his blunted dagger. That was the limit of what he was able to do on his own until Mauhúr had come to the latter part of his questioning. Once all of Mauhúr’s attention was on Grishnákh, Reznib had been freed from further interrogation.

Nervous and relieved to have escaped, Reznib gave Shagrub his hands freely. Shagrub suspected that he needed the distraction, so it was to their mutual good. He sucked in his breath as the other goblin wound the crude bandage around his badly bruised ribs, pulling the material tight. It felt like some of them might have cracked under Noglash’s beating.

“You didn’t tell them everything,” he murmured to Reznib as Reznib came to the end of the burlap. “You didn’t say anything about how Uglúk and Grishnákh kept fighting with each other the whole time, or how they wanted to do different things with the Halflings.”

Reznib blanched. “Here, Shagrub-mate, that wouldn’t have been very politic, now would it? What with Grishnákh looking at me with those eyes of his an’ all? He’s a scary one, is Grishnákh. I think Noglash could take a lesson or two from him. In any case, it’s just dirt in the road now, innit. Not relevant anymore with Uglúk dead and those Halfling thingummies vanished. Whatever Uglúk or Grishnákh wanted or didn’t want to do with them can hardly be of any import _now_.”

Shagrub nodded as if he agreed with this, but the truth was different. He knew more than Reznib did, but he was not ready to share that with the other goblin yet. Might be he wouldn’t speak of it at all: he’d have to wait and see what happened. But there was a lot that Grishnákh _hadn’t_ told, and Shagrub pondered these things, both what had been said and what had gone unspoken, in his own head.


	3. What the Trees Did to Jashit, and What Shagrub Knew.

Of course Grishnákh was not permitted to leave the party now that Mauhúr’s interrogation was completed. No, he must stay and accompany them as they made their way through Fangorn. Like it or not, his fortunes were now bound with theirs.

Grishnákh was neither happy nor unhappy about this. Things had fallen out largely as he had planned, and so there was some satisfaction to be had in that, but the Uruk-hai were _such_ fools that it rather spoiled his pleasure. That petty sadist Noglash in particular: how Grishnákh would have loved to have that idiot back at Lugbúrz, in the dark bowels of Barad-dûr, where he could have his way with the Uruk! Had Grishnákh his desire, and the resources and time, he would have put Noglash to torments beyond the great fool’s imagining: really made him squeal. And even Mauhúr, the Great Leader, seemed not to suspect him in the slightest. They thought it was they who were making use of Grishnákh and not the other way around. It might have been amusing if it weren’t so banal, but perhaps it still passed for a dreary sort of irony.

The goblins, of course, were pathetic: the muck and drivel of Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains, with neither brawn nor backbone, though he suspected they might possess some modicum of intelligence between the four of them. That was usually how it was with the smaller creatures, and so he would have to resist the urge to throttle that little toad Reznib when the opportunity came along. In some unforeseen way they might yet prove of use to him.

Attaching himself to the group had been easy enough, and traveling with them, he would be able to depend on the superior battle prowess of the Uruk-hai. Grishnákh, for all that he carried the sword he had dropped before, was no great hand with a blade. He was serviceable when he had to be: one had to be at least somewhat handy with a weapon to survive in Mordor. Still, it was better to be with those who were truly skilled in weaponry, particularly use of the long sword. That lout Warrung had a terrific reach. And Warrung was useful otherwise as well: he clearly had a superior sense of smell, and might even detect the Halflings before Grishnákh ever caught wind of them.

What superb luck to find himself in the company of a skilled tracker! How surprising to find the skill in an Uruk. Grishnákh had always believed the Uruk-hai to be far inferior to either Orcs or goblins in this regard. Maybe the great fool Saruman, playing mating games with Men and Orcs in his silly tower at Isengard, was on to something after all.

It occurred to Grishnákh that, fortunate as he might have been to find them, Mauhúr and his lads were just as lucky to meet _him_ , Grishnákh of Mordor. Fangorn was an enormous place: they might just as easily never have found each other at all, and in a gaggle of apish Uruk-hai and maggotty goblins, it was only right that there be at least one proper Orc among them. Not that he would try to challenge Mauhúr. That would be importunate. At least…not yet. He would bide his time. For now it was enough to travel in numbers that might be some protection in the evil Forest, and as one of nine seekers he was more likely to find what he was after than only by himself alone.

He felt the heat of his Master’s token at his throat and brought his hand up to cover its sour glow. _No, not alone_ , its faint pulse seemed to say beneath his horny palm. _Never entirely alone._ Just as the Nazgul wore His rings, there were other…devices…such as the Lord of Mordor might entrust to a faithful servant. The token was one such. Only a simple token in appearance, pounded into thinly beaten red copper, but within it resided a delicate charm, the faintest fragment of his Master’s will. A trifle, a toy: compared with the Master Ring this token was less than nothing, but Grishnákh held his hand over it and felt that he bore something of great worth. He had been given it when he set out from Barad-dûr, and with it he knew he carried some aspect of His Lordship.

_Where I go, so goes the Eye as well._

-.-.-.-

“It’s a queer sort of forest,” said Jashit, looking around him as they walked.

“Oh, and I expect you have plenty to compare it to,” said Noglash rudely. “Crawling goblins with your stinking caves…”

“He’s _from_ the Mirkwood,” said Shagrub under his breath. Because Noglash was not looking at him he felt free to roll his eyes.

“There’s no noise in here,” continued Jashit. “Have you noticed? There should be insects, and birdsong. The wind rattling in the leaves above our heads. But we haven’t even seen so much as a squirrel.”

“Plenty of that sort of thing around the edges,” said Durzlip with distaste. “We were under the eaves of Fangorn for over a day, and I remember all of those things. But…you aren’t entirely wrong, I suppose. It _is_ very quiet the further in we go.”

“All to the good, by my way of thinking,” said Mauhúr. “We need to keep a sharp ear out for trouble. This way, there are fewer sounds competing for our attention.”

“Don’t that mean anything out there can hear us as well?” asked Reznib dubiously.

Noglash made a dismissive sound. “Scared, are you? You needn’t be. You are with the Uruk-hai. All things fear us, and we fear nothing.” There was a note of arrogant pride in his voice. This was protection that Shagrub, with his sore ribs and continuing resentment, felt he could have done just as happily without, but he refrained from saying so.

Jashit was still ruminating: “And the branches are so dense above us…you can’t even see the sun. For all we know it may be night by now.”

Without anyone saying anything they came to a slow stop as they all shared the same realization. Walking, they had lost all sense of time. With no proper frame of reference, no sense of time’s passage, they might walk insensibly onward forever.

Mauhúr turned abruptly to face the rest of them. “Right!” he said. “We _don’t_ know what time it is. And while I suppose it may not be that important, I think it would be better for all of us to have some sense of things in the world outside of Fangorn, and better yet, to get some lay of the land. Find out where we are in these woods, and how far we have yet to go. You, goblin, you say you come from a place of trees. Can you climb?”

A short laugh burst out of Jashit, which he quickly stifled at a look from Mauhúr. Of course he could climb. Above ground or below, a goblin is a goblin, isn’t he? All he needs is the right tree.

They came to a tall old fir that met Jashit’s loose specifications, and he gamely pulled off his boots and began to climb. Even Noglash could not complain about the goblin’s alacrity: he threw himself into the task and within a minute was out of sight, leaving his erstwhile companions to look around them and shift the weight of their bodies from one foot to another as they waited.

But suddenly there came a loud cry, and they saw Jashit again much sooner than any of them had anticipated as he came thrashing down through the branches of the fir tree and hit the ground with a thump.

They gathered around him, laughing uproariously at what had just happened. Orcs have their best laughter at the expense of others, and really it was very funny to watch the goblin pick his head up, bleeding from his chin and working his jaw to see if it was broken. When it wasn't he got up painfully, scowling, and snarled at them. "Enough. That HURT, blast your eyes!" Between chuckles, Mauhúr asked him what he had seen. "Nothing," said Jashit angrily, brushing loose plant litter from his clothing. "I was thrown out before I could get that high."

“Thrown?”

“Yes, thrown. That tree—it THREW me, before I had even reached twenty feet.” _Threw him…?_ several of them repeated in their bemusement, to which he responded with great irritation, “Yes, **_threw me_** , yes! I said as much, didn’t I? _Sha pushdug_ , I am sick of this place. At least in the Mirkwood all you have to watch out for are the Elves and the giant spiders: you don’t have to watch out for the bloody plant-life as well.”

“I don’t believe it,” muttered Noglash in an aside to his fellow Uruk-hai. “He’s making it up. That little worm is just too lazy to bother himself with climbing all the way to the top.”

“Come now, Noglash. As hard as he came down?” Durzlip jerked his head toward Jashit, who was still grumbling to himself as the other three goblins gathered around to look at his battle wound. “That’s a rather extreme way to get out of a bit of work. Even for a lazy person.”

“Then why don’t we just send him up another tree?” said Noglash, but when Mauhúr proposed this he met with flustered indignation from Jashit.

“I won’t! You can’t make me! You can beat me, kick me, pull my hair out, but I am _not_ climbing another tree in this wretched forest!”

Mauhúr shrugged and did not try to persuade the goblin further. Noglash was more than willing to do that for him. Noglash had taken Jashit’s words deeply to heart. Before he was done with the goblin Jashit tried two other trees, each with much the same result.

What with all of Noglash’s encouragement and the repeated discouragement Jashit kept receiving from the forest trees, he was beginning to look very much the worse for wear. Bruised and tremblingly compliant, he approached his fourth tree with closed eyes and a look of long-suffering resignation on his battered face. But before he ever even touched the tree, there came a cracking sound overhead. The tree shuddered, and a large branch fell from it, tumbling down out of the leafy green. Jashit, wailing and leaping backward, only narrowly avoided being struck.

“Not likely that it just _happened_ to rot through at that moment, is it,” remarked Durzlip, advancing cautiously to look down at the branch lying on the ground, and then up at the tree from which it had fallen. The tree quivered ominously. He took a respectful step back, hands up and fingers fanned in the universal (he hoped) gesture of conciliation.

“We don’t seem to be getting very far with this approach,” Grishnákh observed sardonically. He had made a point of standing well away from any of the trees around them.

“I agree,” said Mauhúr. “Come on then, Noglash, Durzlip—all of you. We’ll keep walking: look for higher ground. It’s the best that I can think of at this point.”

-.-.-.-

They kept walking until they found a point where, gradually, the ground began to rise. The trees started thinning out: both in girth, their trunks more slender than others encountered thus far, and they grew further apart from one another as well, though the canopy overhead was still mostly unbroken and the atmosphere beneath it remained gloomy. Birch and elm and tall beach tree, their limbs were hung with mossy lichens that only contributed to the darksome aspect of Fangorn. More than once the Uruk-hai would shudder and impatiently knock aside a trailing loop of plant-life that had brushed by their heads or shoulders. The shorter goblin-Orcs did not have to worry about this: for them it was the tangle of deciduous undergrowth that presented the most difficulties. At times it actually came waist-high on their short bodies, and they had to keep a sharp eye out for gorse and other prickly shrubbery.

If Grishnákh, who was taller than the goblin-Orcs but shorter than the Uruk-hai, was troubled by either phenomenon, he did not show it. He only continued to walk somewhere near the middle of the group, uttering an occasional snide remark but for the most part making the journey in silence. Shagrub was watching Grishnákh, still thinking his private thoughts about the larger Orc and about the mystery that attended him. Mauhúr, Shagrub knew—for he made it his place to read others and to have some idea of what they were thinking—had his own reservations and questions about Grishnákh, but Mauhúr had not pursued them further as yet. Most likely, whatever his thoughts, there was nothing he could quantifiably pin down.

He did not, after all, know what Shagrub knew. Yet knowledge, such as it was, only brought more questions. For example, Shagrub knew that Grishnákh had not gone along when Uglúk raced off to stop the stampede at the knoll outside of Fangorn.

Shagrub knew, because he had been near to the Halflings when it happened.

-.-.-.-

_It was not on purpose – not at first, at any rate. He had flung himself into the long grass, panting and stupid, and had been largely insensible of his surroundings. It had been a long day and a hard run, and at first Shagrub did no more than lay there, his tongue lolling out and his mind divorced from thought._

_Goblins, despite their short bowed legs, are able to run for extended periods, but they certainly do not like it, and much of the journey he had just made had been under open sunlight: light that he could barely stand, though necessity had forced them all to bear it that day. Running in sunlight and for an extended period had done him in and he had no energy at that point to run or to speak or to do much of…well…ruddy well anything but lie there. Lie there and, after a time, draw himself up enough to crouch in the long grass, staring beyond the outlines of other Orcs at where the watch fires of the Rohirrim bloomed around them, and where he could see the silhouettes of the Horse Boys themselves, moving incessantly beyond the periphery of camp in the silver moonlight._

_He watched the fires and listened to the Halflings’ Uruk guards talking grimly about the situation they were in, and then Uglúk came and spoke of Mauhúr (though Shagrub did not know who that was at the time), who would soon come from the forest to assist them. When Uglúk spoke up Shagrub crouched down lower, not wanting to be spotted by the Uruk captain and given any kind of task. What cursed ill luck that he had chosen this particular spot to lie down! But there now, Uglúk and his lads were focused on other things; as long as he kept quiet and didn’t draw anyone’s attention, he might continue to rest._

_That was how he happened to be there when the clamor and the shouting arose. Rohirrim horsemen had ridden in and killed some Orcs on the east side of the knoll where they were resting. Uglúk went off immediately, and the other Uruk guards ran with him._

_Shagub did not stir himself. With no immediately visible threat to him, he did not have the energy to be concerned. So a few more lads had been picked off. Plenty had died already, to his way of thinking. Indeed, many had died on the knife points of other Orcs in their company. The knowledge that Men were riding into camp and knocking off Orcs at their leisure was only slightly more troubling than the butchers who surrounded him on a daily basis: the tall Uruk-hai who swore and hounded him and his kind, and mocked them for their weakness by daylight and for their inferior size._

**_Run you little rats_ ** _, they shouted as they ran behind you, and they stuck you through if you were unfortunate enough to fall within their reach…_

_Great Eye, but he was tired of running, tired of being afraid. He lay there in the long dark grass, not far from where the Uruk-hai had kept their guard over the Halflings. He’d caught a few glimpses of them over the course of the past few days, spying them from time to time through the running bodies. Funny little things they were, no bigger than him, with their strange fur-covered feet and the curling hair on their heads. They lay prone now and he could hear them murmur among themselves. They were not aware of his presence and he was, at that point, only absently aware of theirs._

_Shagrub had a vague thought that, if Uglúk were to come back and to wonder what Shagrub was doing so near the prisoners – what with ongoing argument between Uglúk and Grishnákh over them, and the possessive way Uglúk acted about the little creatures, he might become suspicious of ulterior motives – or why Shagrub wasn't making himself useful putting a fire together or other stupid nonsense, it would behoove him to have some kind of reason. Perhaps he could simply say that he was keeping an eye on the two captives in the absence of the Uruk-hai._

_Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw an ape-like figure moving in a stooped and sneaking way, up the knoll toward the Halflings. He tensed, and the Halflings fell silent as they felt the presence behind them. It was Grishnákh, of course, and as he put his hands on them he spoke. He was whispering, too softly for Shagrub to make out anything distinct, but there was an evil undertone in his whisper: it was easy to see that the Mordor Orc was up to something dastardly as he pawed over the prisoners._

_Shagrub relaxed, thinking he need no longer concern himself about the matter. He was rarely much bothered about the wellbeing of anyone outside his immediate person, and he certainly had no reason to care about the Halflings one way or another. It was too bad for them, that’s all. He knew what it was to be the subject of mistreatment, but that is the way of the world: small creatures that lack sense or some form of self-defense will fall prey to all kinds of nastiness from larger creatures._

_But then one of the captives whispered something back to Grishnákh, and the change that came over the Orc was so sudden and so stark, even in the darkness, that Shagrub rose up on one elbow, ears perking up as he tried to listen._

_“…Find what? What are you talking about, little one?”_

_The Halfling made a strange sound with his throat, as if there were something caught in it and he was trying to swallow it down. “… **gollum, gollum** …Nothing, my precious.”_

_Shagrub’s brow furrowed in the dark. That sound meant little to him but the same could obviously not be said of Grishnákh: Shagrub could **smell** his excitement even from over here. More fits and starts of speech, hard to make out, and Grishnákh’s strange thick voice: “Do I want it? Do I want it? What would I give for it? What do you mean?”_

_Shagrub grimaced, thinking all manner of ill thoughts, but that evidently wasn’t what the three were talking about at all. It seemed that Grishnákh was after some other prize, which the Halflings were offering in exchange for his untying them. It went back and forth like this for a few moments. Grishnákh gave no sign that he was willing to do as the Halflings wanted, though he was clearly becoming more and more keyed up. “Have you got it – either of you?” he said at last, seeming to lose his patience._

_“ **Gollum, gollum**!”_

_“Untie our legs!”_

_Shagrub had been straining to hear much of what was said, for it had been a mainly whispered conversation, but what next came out of Grishnákh’s mouth was clearly audible and might easily have been heard by any Orc sitting in Shagrub’s place at that moment, even someone who hadn’t been paying attention up till now. “ **Curse you, you filthy little vermin!** Untie your leg? I’ll untie every string in your bodies. Do you think I can’t search you to the bones? I’ll cut you both to quivering shreds. I don’t need the help of your legs to get you away—and have you all to myself!” _

_And he made good on his word, grabbing them both up and making off with them._

_Shagrub, amazed by the suddenness of it, actually rose up on all fours and stared openmouthed after the hurriedly departing Grishnákh, with his captives under either arm. After a few stupid seconds the obvious question came to mind: should he run and find Uglúk? It might get him in good with their absent leader if he were to turn in the traitorous Grishnákh, enabling Uglúk and his Uruk-hai to recover their prize. But did he really want to get mixed up in politics? He was neither of Mordor nor of Isengard, and he had not come on this merry jaunt for pleasure or any special ambition for advancing himself with either lot._

_What advantage was there in making himself known for a telltale and a troublemaker? And what if Uglúk was angry at him for not doing something sooner, when he first realized what was going on, or just became enraged with him as the bearer of ill tiding? Other messengers had been beaten or maimed for less. Better perhaps to stay where he was and say nothing, and let no one ever know he had seen what happened…_

_It was while he lay there, wondering what to do, that he heard the shouting and the screaming and the cursing of other Orcs growing louder, and beneath it all the drumming of hoof beats coming ever closer and more quickly. The Men were riding through the very heart of the Orc camp. Hesitation had made the decision for him: seeking advancement was the last thing he needed to worry about right now. Right now he would have to look sharp just to avoid being trampled, and he couldn't afford to waste his thoughts on Grishnákh or Uglúk or the Halflings and their fate. He had to look out for himself._

_So he was very much focused on other things – yet nevertheless he heard the loud cry behind him, and he turned in time to see, far off in the silver, almost beneath the very leaves of Fangorn, the shape of a horseman riding, and the apelike figure loping in the grass – Grishnákh, he saw at once from the silhouette – and then the rider sent a spear through the running Orc so that he screeched horribly and fell mid-run…_

_…and Shagrub himself was running now, up and sidelong and he knew not whither as the horsemen rode down the proud Uruk-hai and slaughtered them in a welter of black blood and the goblins were trampled, screaming, and he **RAN** …_

_Only to find himself in a knot of Uruk-hai that had formed a defensive counter-group like a big wen on the eastern side of the knoll, where Uglúk was shouting orders. This group of Uruk-hai was firmly under Uglúk’s authority. With his leadership they had become the one steady point of Orkish resistance, and as Shagrub stumbled into and under their feet they turned and moved in accord with Uglúk’s command. In a disciplined rout they drove back the horse riders, who were, despite the havoc they had caused, only relatively few in number. They had ridden in to achieve one simple task, which they had now accomplished: kill a few Orcs and throw the rest into a panic. Once they saw that the Orcs were no longer panicking but had assembled themselves into fighting formation, the horsemen rode off, and Uglúk, snarling and shouting, pulled the camp together again._

_Shagrub, though, had had enough. Uglúk and his Uruk-hai might be some protection for now, but it was clearly temporary. The horsemen were more than the numbers that they had sent in – their ranks were growing hour by hour, and when morning came they would be in their full strength. Meanwhile Uglúk and his Uruk-hai, to say nothing of those Orcs and goblin-Orcs that yet remained, were much diminished from what they had been, and they were all of them anxious, rundown and weary._

_Shagrub, with the excellent night vision that is characteristic of goblins, found himself appointed as a sentry, and he followed the orders he was given with an air of craven obedience. But he had already made his decision. Before the sun rose, when the sky was just turning gray and the dew was glimmering on the grass, he took his helmet off and threaded it on the dirty cord he wore around his waist for a belt, and he laid his new sword in the grass, the same sword he had taken only hours before from the hand of a dead Uruk and which he had finally conceded was too heavy for him, and he crept out of camp. There were a few shouts when somebody noticed him running away, but other goblins had also been deserting in a steady trickle over the course of the night: the archers were saving what arrows remained to them for the horse boys, and he knew there would be no pursuit. Uglúk and his boys were for it, bound in their maneuvers as they tried alternately to evade or to engage with the insistent, indefatigable Rohirrim._

_Shagrub knew he was well out of it._

-.-.-.-

Shagrub watched Grishnákh and studied this matter in his heart. How was this Orc, an Orc he had seen for himself go down with a spear through his body, a dying Orc left to bleed in the grass…how was it that Grishnákh was still standing? And how did he retain, so far as Shagrub could tell, no ill effects from the experience? Grishnákh appeared uninjured: he did not limp, he carried himself steadily, and there were no bandages on his body. But one of his shoulders was a little hunched, and there was a shiny scar on the back of his hand that Shagrub had not seen before.

This was all Shagrub could think: that Grishnákh had in fact been injured, had in fact gone down beneath a spear of Rohan, and had recovered from the ordeal, healing mysteriously and literally overnight. Ridiculous, but what other explanation was there?

Did Grishnákh have some sort of magic that allowed him to do this? Was it something to do with the token around his neck? Shagrub had seen how he put his hand over it from time to time with an expression that might have been of comfort or of pain, as if it either burned or soothed the skin on which it rested. Just a little piece of beaten metal like Shagrub had seen others from Mordor wear, but he had never seen any of them treat theirs with such reverence.

Shagrub made up his mind that he would get a closer look at this strange piece of copper at the first opportunity. But he would have to do it without Grishnákh knowing he had taken an interest, for Shagrub doubted very much that Grishnákh would take kindly to such curiosity. Indeed, if he suspected that Shagrub knew his secret, he might well try to kill him. Not a prospect that Shagrub really liked.

Life, he thought, had grown very complicated of late.


	4. In Which a Self-Respecting Band of Orcs Find Themselves In a Very Strange Place.

The way was becoming steeper now, and there were loose rocks and gravel that made the going treacherous. The smaller goblins were doing well enough with this, for they were accustomed to all manner of stony and shifting terrain beneath the earth, but Noglash was not so happy: Shagrub could hear the Uruk muttering some interesting things as he stumbled and skidded along behind. He did not look back: he was too busy watching Grishnákh, though Grishnákh did not seem aware that he was being observed so closely. The Orc walked with his eyes focused on the way before him, with no gaze spared for either Shagrub or the others. Until suddenly Grishnákh stopped, saying:

“We cannot go this way.”

"What?" The others in front turned around, Mauhúr giving the Orc a curious look, while Shagrub stared at the way Grishnákh clasped the token around his neck.

"No further. There's something up this way that’s… _off_ ," said Grishnákh. He said the last word uncertainly, as if he weren’t entirely sure what even he meant by it.

But Mauhúr needed something more definite than that. He was not prepared to base any of his decisions on an unknown quantity like Grishnákh, whose agenda he could not be certain of, nor his (possibly suspect) intuition. "Do you hear something?" Mauhúr asked Warrung, turning to the larger Orc.

Warrung, for his part, looked at Grishnákh in puzzlement. "I hear nothing. Except…" He stared back over their heads. "We certainly can’t go back,” he said flatly.

"Why not?" demanded Noglash from the back of the group. "I will tell you all now—Warrung, you know I respect your word, but I am getting very sick of all these conversations about things I cannot see or hear. If you think—"

"Look back, Noglash, and I promise you," said Mauhúr, who was also staring now. "You will see this."

Noglash spun around to discover what the others had already seen at this point: the limbs of the trees behind them shaking and tossing, leaves rattling like sabers in their scabbards. At the base of the wrinkled tree trunks, roots were writhing like live things, like weathered giants curling their toes in the earth. A massive oak was moaning up out of the ground, as if an enormous invisible hand drew it inexorably out of the ancient soil. "Great Hand of Isengard—!"

"The trees," Gobsnud moaned. "The trees are coming for us."

"Well, they don't have us yet," said Mauhúr slowly, with obstinate calm. Forcing his gaze away from the forest and upon the Orcs under his leadership, he spoke to them in such a way that they had to listen. "It looks as if we will have to keep going as we've been going. Retracing our steps isn't an option at this point. _Straight forward_ ," Mauhúr said, looking at each of them in turn. "Straight forward and no looking back. Don't even look sideways, just keep your eyes on what’s in front of you. We will not stay here another moment." As if in afterthought: “And don’t run. Do not let them see you’re afraid.”

They did not run, but the pace certainly picked up, the Uruk-hai stumbling and cursing, the goblins scurrying forward, sometimes on two legs but sometimes on all four, as if they were beasts. Behind them, the wood was howling, a howling that built like an enormous wind, like a thousand angry spirits of oak and elm, of rowan and ash, beech and birch, their enraged foliage thirsting for Orkish blood. At the same time there was an invisible buffeting about the wayfarers’ bodies as if the very wind were trying to prevent them from going any further.

Shagrub was concentrating too much on just keeping his footing to watch Grishnákh any more, and Grishnákh for his part was squeezing the amulet he wore. _Great Lord,_ he thought _, I know You would not have me go this way, but I must. You are the Great Eye: You See that I must. You See the way it is. Trust in me: I am Your servant. I **will** find Your Halflings…_

But he hissed under his breath, for the charm was an angry heat against his skin, a searing punishing warning that this was not the way, _this was not the way_ …

"Oh! The trees! The trees!" Gobsnud wailed behind them, his voice growing hoarser and faint. He was smaller than the rest of them and the wind was too much for him: from the sound of it, hard as he was exerting himself, he was falling further and further behind. And then suddenly he screamed, a horrible scream of pain and mortal terror—

"Don't look back!" yelled Mauhúr, pushing forward. The wind flung dirt and stones against them, so that they had to walk with their arms up over their eyes.

Shagrub was lost in it, dirt and dust and gravel flying up, no idea of anything at this point, of anyone around him. _Perhaps this will be what kills me_ , he thought. He would be blown off this horrible mountain, tossed into the angry green sea of leaves below, torn to pieces by the angry trees…

…then, as suddenly as it had come up, the wind died down, and there was silence. Blindly they continued to stumble forward several paces, caught by the momentum of their bodies and a reluctance to trust their own senses. Mauhúr stopped first, lowering his arms and blinking. "All of you," he said at last, "Lower your arms… I think that it is over.” Slowly they did as he said, and he looked around at them. “Are we all here?"

"I think so…" said Durzlip. "No, wait – " He pointed to each of them with his ragged talon, counting them all in turn.

"Where's Gobsnud?" exclaimed Jashit, looking around in sudden alarm. None of them could see the goblin. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted: " ** _GOBSNUD_** …!"

"He's…gone," said Reznib, looking back in horror. There was no sign of Gobsnud, no sign of what had just happened. The forest was still and settled, as if nothing like what they had all just witnessed could ever have happened in its peaceful depths.

"Feh. No loss there," said Noglash, but he looked shaken. "Little worm was holding us back anyhow."

" _Gobsnud!_ " Jashit called again, and there was a distraught look in his face. He took a step, ready to charge back the way they had come, but Reznib caught his skinny shoulder.

"No, don't. Don't!"

"He came from the Mirkwood with me. We've been together all this time. We're the only two left from Mirkwood - the others were all…I can't be the only one left…" Jashit was trembling, his red eyes wide and unseeing.

“Well don’t go sniveling about it,” said Noglash, but he didn’t say it as nastily as might have been expected. Perhaps he was thinking of his own mate Nulak and Nulak’s messy end, not twenty-four hours before.

That might also have been why Mauhúr didn’t push for them to move on immediately, in part at any rate. He gave gruff instructions to take a breather and for Durzlip to divvy up some of their rations while they rested. Under Mauhúr’s earlier command Durzlip had requisitioned all of the food they had between them – now, at their leader’s word, Durzlip opened his pack and took out a piece of stale gray bread and a strip of tough jerkey, which he tore apart with his dirty claws and shared out sparingly amongst them. Precious little food in the pack, and with no sniff of game to be had in dark Fangorn, they would need to be frugal. There was no muttering, not even among the goblin-Orcs, whose food had been commandeered earlier. Jashit did not have the presence of mind to pay attention to what he was eating, let alone how small a portion he had received, and Reznib and Shagrub knew better than to mutter with Noglash so close by.

While the others ate and while Jashit presumably pulled himself together, Mauhúr took Warrung by the shoulder and tugged him apart from the others. “The air is strange here,” he said in a quiet voice. “I don’t have your own degree of perception, Warrung, but I’m counting on your opinion. Back the way we came. It looks…different, somehow.”

They were standing on a rocky abutment that looked out over a slope of scree: gray shifting gravel and large rocks. Treacherous terrain, of a sort that might easily give way and slide down the mountain taking any travelers with it, if it weren’t for the anchorage of the trees and their strong roots.

Or that was what Mauhúr and Warrung had remembered of the upward climb. But now…

“It _is_ different,” said Warrung, staring. “I don’t remember it looking like that at all. Are you sure we – ” He turned to look in another direction, as if to find the original path they had taken to reach this promontory, but making the same realization as Mauhúr had – that, in fact, no direction looked particularly familiar to him – he turned his head and stared again.

“Yes,” Mauhúr said, nodding his head slowly, “that is the way we came, all right. But look at it.”

Rather than the stony way they had come or the variegated angry trees, they saw a gentle slope down into docile, innocuous firs. A stream ran below them, disappearing and reappearing amid the little hillocks below. A breeze brought the scent of water and pine trees to them, and the two Uruk-hai lifted their heads, both leaning into it at once.

“It’s more than that,” spoke Warrung, saying at last, reluctantly, what he knew they were both thinking. “I mean, it’s not just about scent, is it? All you have to do is look up…” And as he said it they both did so, Warrung with a wondering, troubled gaze and Mauhúr with hooded gray eyes, into the yellow warmth of a benevolent sun.

They flinched and looked at one another uneasily.

“We’d best be moving,” said Mauhúr at last. “If the snaga have too long to think about it, they’ll panic more than they already have. Besides, we need to find out where we are, and we won’t learn that any sooner by staying up here.”

-.-.-.-

Shagrub shuddered, pulling the neck of his tunic up over the exposed skin at his nape. 

“And we thought yesterday was bad, eh, Shagrub,” Reznib commented in an undertone behind him.

Shagrub muttered a gloomy assent. Yesterday they had run beneath a white winter sun across the drab grasslands to the south of Fangorn, beneath the whips and hoots of their larger fellows. There were no whips now, but that didn’t make Shagrub feel any safer – not so long as he knew that Noglash with his big sword was all but treading on their heels – and the warmth of the sun overhead, and the hiss and spray and glub of water, passing over and between the heavy stones in the stream that ran beside them, only added to Shagrub’s discomfort, and that of Reznib.

“Shagrub,” said Reznib, more quietly now, and hesitant. “You smell it, don’t you?”

“Smell what?” asked Shagrub, though he suspected that he knew what the other goblin was going to ask.

“The, erm, spring smell.” Shagrub said nothing but Reznib forged ahead anyway: “It’s only that…wasn’t it February, only an hour ago?” He paused, waiting for a response that never came. “It _was_ February, wasn’t it?” he repeated, his voice becoming more insistent.

“Hi,” said Noglash behind them, “who said you little vermin could talk?”

“Who said we couldn’t?” Reznib retorted with a surprising show of spirit. Shagrub’s ears perked up at the audacity of his fellow goblin, though he did not looked behind him. He had no wish to entangle himself in this small act of mutiny.

“Are you giving me guff?” Noglash sounded surprised too, and surprisingly pleased: a bully, eager to deal out ill treatment and just handed the perfect opportunity.

Reznib would certainly have been in trouble if Durzlip hadn’t taken that moment to interject. “Noglash, leave off. He’s right enough, we’ve not given them any orders.”

Noglash let out a slow hiss, obviously annoyed at this correction from a fellow Uruk. “How remiss of us. We’ll have to fix that, won’t we?”

“All of you, shut your mouths,” came a sharp comment from the front of the group, where Mauhúr had stopped walking.

“ _Hi, listen_ ,” whispered Durzlip in almost the same instant, as they all came to an abrupt halt.

Shagrub craned his head, trying to see past Durzlip and the muscled frame of Warrung. He could not see whatever or whoever it was approaching them, but his well-formed sensitive ears could hear a strange, husky, almost growling voice somewhere up ahead of them.

“I’ve a funny sort of feeling  
On this funny sort of day  
Can you see how high the ceiling  
Is, so blue and far away?  
If the world should turn over  
Then the birds would all fly by  
And our heads would be in clover  
As we walked across the sky.

“But the sky is not a ceiling  
So it cannot be a floor  
And I have a funny feeling  
About what would be in store  
If the sky and clouds were under  
And the up was grass and heather  
That we would not walk but tumble  
Through the bright blue sky forever.”

Shagrub felt himself being jostled as Noglash and Jashit drew up beside him. He looked at Reznib and saw the same bafflement on his own face reflected back at him, then sidelong at Jashit, whose terrified eyes were as wide as saucers, and finally up at Noglash. Noglash was not speaking out loud, but his mouth was moving anyway in a distinct _What. The. Fuck._

A second voice spoke up: a smallish, timid sort of voice, but one that seemed to gather courage as it spoke. “I like it, only, you can’t really rhyme tumble and under, can you?”

“That’s what I said to myself too,” said the first voice. “But they sound as though they want to go together, so I told them that they could.”

“I suppose it could be off-rhyme. Under and tumble and number and other… Or is that a-sonance? Are a-sonance and off-rhyme the same thing?” Second Voice asked, faltering.

“I wouldn’t know, but I’m sure that you’re right,” First Voice answered humbly.

The two speakers must have stopped where they were, for their speech had not grown appreciably louder since the first voice began its declamation. It was coming from somewhere just beyond a little bend in the trees immediately ahead.

At the front of the cluster of waiting Orcs, Mauhúr looked at each of his fellow Uruk-hai. At the center of the anxious cluster, Shagrub flinched at the metallic whispers of four swords leaving their sheaths at once. Jashit, who was to the right of Noglash, gulped hard and edged away from the naked steel exposed at his side, but when a fifth blade emerged from its scabbard he was effectively caught between the two. Grishnákh was left-handed.

Mauhúr looked behind him, and though his eyes flicked toward Grishnákh’s sword he did not indicate for Grishnákh to put it away. Instead he gave a slight jerk of his chin. Grishnákh shook his head, and Shagrub, watching their silent conversation intently, nonetheless knew the import of their exchange. Mauhúr was asking if these two voices were those of the fugitive Halflings, and Grishnákh was saying that they were not. Shagrub could have told them both as much. He might not have any direct sort of contact with the Halflings himself, but he had still heard them speaking amongst themselves and with Grishnákh. These voices were distinct – and distinctly _not_ those of the two escapees.

“You could use thunder to rhyme with under instead,” the second voice was saying. “Those rhyme perfectly with each other. Or blunder!” And it squeaked out:

“If the sky and clouds were under  
And the up was grass and heather  
That we would not walk but blunder  
Through the bright blue sky forever…”

This time when Mauhúr looked back he was looked at all of them. He had only to nod once and they followed, all of them, with the same unity of purpose, even the goblins. Shagrub could feel the grimness radiating from Reznib and was himself invigorated by a sudden inner clarity. Whoever these two voices belonged to, they would face them, and they would fight or fell them with all their might. No more hesitation, no more fear. Only action.

“I don’t know, though. Somehow, it just doesn’t feel like blunder is quite what – ”

“ _Hoi, you there. Stand where you are_ ,” barked Mauhúr as he burst through the trees that hid the speakers from view.

“Oh dear. Oh, dearie, dearie, dear!” squeaked the smaller of the two voices. It belonged to a small creature with tall pointed ears and a green scarf and jumper. Two small round eyes like bright black beads stared out of its pink face. It was no Halfling, but neither was it anything that Shagrub had ever seen before. Obviously frightened, it caught hold of the arm of its larger companion. “Oh Pooh, I’ve never seen _them_ before. Whoever can they be?”

“Why, I expect they are some more of Rabbit’s friends-and-relations,” said the small bearlike creature as the grim party of Orcs bore down upon them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter where I lose all of my readers and Dorothy Parker. ;) Well, for good or bad, let me know what you think. I'll add appropriate tags for the crossover fandom when I put up Chapter 5.


	5. In Which Pooh and Piglet Meet a Band of Fierce Bad Animals.

Piglet had woken up that morning and decided he was happy. He was not the Most Decisive of Animals and he did not always know his own mind, but he really did think that Happy was just what he was. Climbing out of his wooden truckle bed in the shadow of Pooh’s dresser, he immediately stood tiptoe and thrust his small arms into the air in a Long Stretch.

Pooh was still sleeping in a great warm lump under his quilt, but that was not unusual. Bear was not much of an Early Riser, whereas Piglet, for his part, could never seem to close his eyes again once they were opened for the day, even when he wanted to, and just then he did not want to. And so, ignoring Pooh, he began to bustle and busy himself in Pooh’s larder.

When Pooh opened his eyes he found the table set for two. Piglet was sitting in his chair, his legs kicking idly in the air in front of him, and when he saw Pooh sitting upright he let out a chirp of greeting. “Good morning, Pooh Bear! Did you sleep well?”

“Good morning, Little Piglet,” yawned Pooh, rubbing at his eyes and blinking at Piglet in a friendly way. “Yes, and I had a very nice dream. I was dreaming that I smelled toast, and now there’s toast on the table. How long have you been awake?”

“Oh, not very long,” said Piglet modestly. “I thought I would have breakfast ready for you when you woke.”

“That must be why I dreamt about it,” said Pooh. “Do you suppose,” he continued thoughtfully, “it would be so very bad for me to eat breakfast before I do my Stoutness Exercises?”

“I don’t know. Do you expect you’ll do them afterward, if you eat first?”

“Probably not,” Pooh answered in a heavy voice.

“Then you had best do them now,” said Piglet. Noticing the mournful nod of Pooh’s head: “Is it all right if I do them with you?”

“No, not at all,” said Pooh, who was glad of the company.

And so Pooh and Piglet did Pooh’s Exercises together, after which they were very happy to be able to sit and not say anything for a while as they munched on their toast. Pooh had his with honey, of course, and Piglet had his spread very thickly with butter and jam, and by the time they had finished they were both satisfied and more than a little sticky.

“And what will you be doing today, Pooh?” asked Piglet, as he wiped his face with a cold cloth, wet from Pooh’s china wash jug. He lowered it, feeling greatly refreshed.

“Well Piglet, I don’t know,” said Pooh in a muffled voice from behind his wet towel. “I expect I shall go and pay a call on Rabbit, and then on Kanga, because I haven’t been to see her in a while.”

“Oh, _may_ I go with you, Pooh? I do like to see Kanga and Roo, but I never like to do it by myself.” He left the reason unsaid: it was, of course, because Tigger lived with Roo and Kanga, and Piglet was extremely discomfitted by Tigger’s Tendency to Bounce. Although he liked Tigger, was even quite fond of him in many respects, somehow it just felt safer to visit him in the company of the stolid and dependable Pooh.

“Yes of course you may,” said Pooh generously. “I expect that she will be happy to see both of us. She might,” he added, “even invite us in for tea.” Thinking about what and when he would be eating next was one of Pooh’s favorite after-breakfast pursuits.

Piglet, who was not as preoccupied by the thought of their next meal, was still very pleased at the prospect of seeing Kanga, Roo and Tigger. “Maybe,” he said, brightening, “we could pick some flowers for them along the way. Your mastershalums aren’t out yet, but there are bluebells and white anemones growing all through the Wood, and the marsh violets and cuckoo flowers are in full bloom. Oh! And there was yellow celandine growing along the stream up past the Bee Tree the other day. We could pick some of those as well!”

“That would be a very nice thing to do,” agreed Pooh.

“But I will wear a scarf with my jumper,” said Piglet, “because even though the sun is out, there is still a bit of Nip in the air.”

And so after they put away the breakfast things and Piglet put on his scarf, they left Pooh’s house and took the path that led past the Six Pine Trees and to the stream that ran east to west, paralleling the Hundred Acre Wood.

They had not been walking very long when they saw Rabbit moving with brisk purpose in their direction. “Oh, hello Rabbit,” said Pooh. “Would you like to help us pick flowers?”

“We’re going to call on Kanga and Roo and give them flowers as a surprise,” added Piglet excitedly.

Rabbit’s nose twitched as he came to a stop in front of them. “I would, of course, because as you both know, Kanga is a Dear Personal Acquaintance of Mine. But,” he said, “I’m afraid I don’t have the time just now. I am having some of my friends-and-relations over for a Party this afternoon, and I have to get everything ready. Maybe you could ask Owl.” He hurried off quickly, with the air of one who is busy with matters of consequence.

“I expect we _could_ ask Owl,” said Pooh reluctantly, “but I’m not sure how much he would really be able to help.” They both knew that Owl was more likely to regale them with the obscure Classifications and Declensions of the Flora they were picking than he was to actually pick them himself.

“Since we cannot very well call on Rabbit now,” said Piglet, “as he is going to be having Visitors, maybe we could go to Kanga’s when we have picked the flowers instead. And then _afterward_ we can visit Owl.”

Pooh agreed that this was a very good idea and so they decided that they would do it.

They had reached the place where the stream that ran from west to east joined with the stream that ran from east to west and where these two streams decided to make a bigger stream together that slipped away south through the Hundred Acre Wood. By the time it got to the other side, this bigger stream, joined now by many small tributaries, become the “almost a river” that could only be crossed by way of a wooden bridge with wooden rails on either side of it. It was on this bridge, at the southern edge of the Hundred Acre Wood, where Pooh had once invented a game called Poohsticks, and where he and Piglet and other animals still gathered to play from time to time.

But of course right now they were at a very different point in that stream, outside and to the north of the Wood, where you could still get across without a bridge, whether by jumping across, or by splashing through the shallow places, or by means of large stepping stones. All of the three streams that joined up here – west to east and east to west and the south stream running away from them both – had places where large gray stepping stones had been helpfully laid, and so it was easy to get from one side to another without getting wet. And that was just what Pooh and Piglet were doing: first they crossed the stream that ran south, and then they crossed north of the stream running east to west, and then they crossed south of it a little later, back and forth as the whim took them or as they saw flowers they liked more on the other side, and if you had been a bird flying over them and looking down it would have made you dizzy to see.

It happened that they were on the other side of the place where Christopher Robin used to live, and by silent agreement they did not cross over again, but continued further up the stream where the stream was broken by big stones and rocks. It was the same way that they had gone on an Expotition once, to find the North Pole.

They had been walking along talking pleasantly about the stream and the sun and the flowers they were gathering, and about what a cheerful yellow celandine was, and Pooh was saying that he thought dandelions were quite as yellow as celandine, and Piglet was agreeing that this was true, “But dandelions are a Very Common Sort of Flower, you know,” which was why it would not do to offer them to someone as part of a bouquet, and anyway, wasn’t it much nicer to leave them for later, when the bloom was off and they had gone all Fluff, and you could blow on them and make a wish?

After that they had passed into a Comfortable Sort of Silence such as the two of them often enjoyed together, which was eventually broken when Pooh began to hum something under his breath. Piglet listened with some interest, knowing that Pooh was bound to come out with the words to whatever he was humming soon enough, and indeed, that is exactly what happened.

Pooh’s April-Day Hum

I’ve a funny sort of feeling  
On this funny sort of day  
Can you see how high the ceiling  
Is, so blue and far away? …

Piglet listened to Pooh’s Hum and felt envious of his friend. It was true that Pooh was a Bear of Very Little Brain, but he had a Way with Words that Piglet rarely had himself, and he always seemed to think of the most interesting things for his special Hums. They were the kind of fanciful notions that Piglet might muse on any number of times in passing, but whereas Piglet only ever thought those things inside his head, Pooh never seemed to have any trouble saying them out loud or even putting them in the form of a song or poetic verse. Piglet could not help but think this was very clever, and he wished it was a cleverness that he himself possessed.

Maybe this was why, after Pooh had finished his Hum, Piglet said what he did about the last stanza and how it could possibly stand to be tweaked. Pooh listened and nodded at what Piglet said, but he did not seem entirely convinced, and Piglet was beginning to regret having said anything as he wasn’t sure that he was _really_ convinced himself, when just then –

“ _Hoi, you there. Stand where you are._ ”

“Oh dear. Oh, dearie, dearie, dear!” Piglet exclaimed as a group of unknown creatures hurried toward them. They were large and powerfully built, dressed in strange dark clothes and carrying what looked like swords. He caught reflexively at Pooh’s arm. “Pooh, I’ve never seen them before. Whoever can they be?”

“Why, I expect they are some more of Rabbits’ friends-and-relations,” said Pooh as he looked at the largest of the arrivals. “Although I would have expected them to be smaller,” he added thoughtfully.

“Don’t move,” said the big one in front of them. He was tall, with a face like leather and eyes as gray as a winter storm. “Durzlip, you get behind them. See if they’ve got any weapons.”

“They’re not wearing clothes,” growled another of the tall animals, sneering a little. This did not appear to be Durzlip, since that was presumably the name of the big one circling behind them.

“Noglash is right,” said Durzlip from up over their shoulders. “This one is only wearing some sort of a shirt.”

Piglet clutched tighter at Pooh, who patted him gently with his free paw.

“And what’s that they’re holding?” asked the first of the animals again, who seemed to be the group’s leader.

“If you please, they’re flowers,” squeaked Piglet, gathering up his courage and holding them out in front of him.

The big animal looked down at the little bouquet, and then into Piglet’s face, and then Pooh’s. His lip curled up on one side, revealing a very sharp and very yellow tooth. “I’m guessing they’re not dangerous, but stick close behind them, Durzlip. And you, Noglash, you keep a sharp eye on the woods. Warrung, you tell me if you smell anything odd.”

“ _Everything_ smells odd here,” said the tallest animal, shaking his head, “but if it’s dangerous, I’ll tell you, Mauhúr.”

“Are you looking for Rabbit?” asked Piglet nervously. Behind Mauhúr, who appeared to be the leader of the four big animals, he could see three other creatures, similar in some ways to their companions but much shorter, although they were still much larger than Piglet himself. The smallest, he thought, was not that much bigger than his dear friend Pooh, and it was looking back at Piglet with a strangely familiar expression on its face. It was the expression, Piglet realized, of someone as nervous by habit as Piglet himself so often was. That realization made him feel a little better, but not by much.

“Are you asking us if we’re hunting rabbits? Or is Rabbit somebody’s name?” asked Mauhúr, looking at them both intently.

“Rabbit is our friend,” said Pooh. “Do you know him?”

“ _We’ll_ ask the questions,” snapped Noglash, who seemed by nature to be Very Cross Indeed.

“I will, actually,” said the leader in a level voice, his gaze flicking briefly toward Noglash. “Stay calm, everyone. I think these two will _willingly_ tell us all we need to know.”

“We’ll tell you what we can, at any rate,” said Pooh. “Unless we can’t,” he corrected himself. “But we can always take you to someone else who might,” he offered helpfully.

“That’s just what I like to hear,” said Mauhúr, with a grim smile on his strange dark face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick aside: I am relying on book!verse rather than Disney!verse for _Winnie-the-Pooh_. That means Eeyore is more sarcastic than he is gloomy, and there is no Gopher. He’s not in the book, you know.


	6. In Which Mauhúr Conducts an Interrogation and Reznib Makes a Splash.

While Mauhúr interrogated the prisoners (who did not seem exactly to know that they were prisoners) and his fellow Uruk-hai loomed about with characteristic menace, Shagrub, Reznib and Jashit found themselves on the periphery. After the adrenaline rush of a bare few moments before, the realization that they were to have no part in the present business was deflating. Nonetheless, it was pleasant to watch someone else in the crosshairs for a change, and Reznib and Shagrub soon found a way to pass the time as they debated the nature of the two captives.

“The bigger one looks like a bear, I suppose, but he’s smaller than any bear I’ve ever seen that wasn’t a baby.”

“Me, I don’t believe that the other one’s a pig.”

“Not full-grown, no, but he says he’s a piglet, doesn’t he?”

“He says his name is Piglet. That don’t make him one. I’ve eaten pig before, haven’t I, and they don’t look like that. Don’t smell like that neither,” said Shagrub decidedly.

“I’m not even sure he’s a he,” said Jashit, speaking up for the first time since his breakdown earlier.

The other two looked at each other, then at the unsuspecting Piglet thoughtfully. “It is a very pretty scarf,” said Reznib.

Similarly excluded from the action, Grishnákh kept his own counsel nearby, watching the knot of Uruk-hai with narrowed eyes. He could feel the heat of the Eye beneath his hand, and in his mind he called to his Master, asking for what he must do, but the token brought no certainty. This made Grishnákh worried, which in turn made him irritable. What he really would have liked was to push Mauhúr out of the way, show all of them how you take what you want from a prisoner in authentic Lugbúrz style…but somehow he suspected that now was not the time. 

Before, his mind had been divided as to whether it was best to remain with this draggle-tailed group or strike out on his own, but now with the discovery of these two newest fools he saw that it was not so simple. If such as these wandered this strange place, a place that he was no longer even certain was Fangorn, then who knew what else might be skulking in the trees? He would not find favor with his Master if he blundered because he hadn’t properly got his bearings.

The Halflings are beyond your reach, he thought to himself, but there is information here and now that might serve you well if you only listen…

Meanwhile, Mauhúr rubbed his brow as he asked his question again. “Just…tell me, again, in order. What are your numbers?”

“Numbers?”

“How many of you are there? Tell me your names.”

“He’s Pooh,” said Piglet, turning to Pooh.

“And he’s Piglet,” said Pooh helpfully.

Mauhúr sighed. “Yes, yes…”

“And then of course there’s Rabbit,” said Pooh. “And Eeyore. And Owl.”

“And Kanga and Tigger and Roo.”

“But you said there was someone else,” said Mauhúr coaxingly. “Someone you called Robin…?”

“Christopher Robin,” whispered Piglet, his eyes brimming.

Pooh lowered his head as if it had suddenly become very heavy. “Not for a very long time,” he said.

“Do you know him?” asked Piglet, looking up at Mauhúr. “Have you seen our Christopher Robin?”

“What does he look like?” demanded Mauhúr. “Is he a Man? An Elf?”

“Oh no,” said Piglet. “He’s a boy.”

“A very special boy,” said Pooh.

“Is he a Mannish sort of boy, then?” tried Mauhúr, but the question only seemed to baffle them.

“He’s a…boy?” said Piglet again anxiously, and he cast a worried sort of look at Pooh.

“All right,” said Mauhúr, “answer me this. How tall was he? What did he look like?”

Upon which Pooh and Piglet regaled him with excited descriptions of what the Orcs eventually gathered was a smallish, lively sort of Man-child who wore blue bracers under his tunic and very short trousers, and who was their dear friend and knew just about everything worth knowing, but who had to go away because it turned out that there was still more for him to Find Out, and who certainly did not have hairy feet, thank you very much! – this last being an answer to impatient Grishnákh, who had finally grown tired of not being involved and had summarily injected himself into the proceedings.

After which Mauhúr and his lads determined that they had learned three things:

Thing the First: Christopher Robin, whoever he was, was not likely to be back any time soon;

Thing the Second: Christopher Robin was not a hobbit;

Thing the Third: in the absence of Christopher Robin, their next likeliest sources of information about this strange place were either Owl, who lived in a venerable old beech tree that had once belonged to Piglet, or Rabbit, who was preparing for some sort of party that very day.

“That’s who we thought you were, you see,” said Pooh, “visitors of Rabbit’s. Only it turns out that you aren’t.”

Durzlip and Noglash both started snickering, but they stopped after another glance from Mauhúr.

“All right,” said Mauhúr. “Here is what I want. Of these two people, Owl and Rabbit, which is the closest to us?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Pooh. “Rabbit is much closer. We only have to follow this stream – ”

“Right,” said Mauhúr, in a quick, decided tone that Rabbit would likely have approved of. “Then you will take us to this Rabbit so that we can ask him more questions.”

“But Pooh,” said Piglet anxiously, for he had not yet got over his nervousness in the presence of these large fierce animals, and the morning was passing quickly, “we were going to go call on Kanga and Roo still!”

“It probably won’t take us very long at Rabbit’s,” said Pooh reasonably. “I expect we can go and see them after.” He looked up at Mauhúr. “Follow me?”

“Right behind you,” said Mauhúr, looking down at him.

-.-.-.-

It really was a very lovely day, with the warm sun shining down and bright birdsong all around them, but Piglet could no longer enjoy it. He kept thinking about how Happy he had been that morning. Then the day had seemed full of exciting possibilities. How pleased he had been as he set the table with Pooh’s good porcelain and browned their toast by a cozy morning hearth, thinking of what the day might have in store. 

Now he felt nervous and more than a little claustrophobic, hemmed in as he was by the dark legs of the tall animals that had found them. In the course of their walk along the stream, some of the animals had interposed themselves between him and Pooh, and somehow Piglet felt that this was not an accident, thought he couldn’t begin to imagine the purpose behind it. All he knew was that he felt dreadfully lonely not to have the comfort of Pooh’s elbow, and frightened to be walking between the very tall Noglash instead, who kept scowling down at him, and the equally large Durzlip, who did not make so many harsh faces but who still didn’t seem very friendly. 

He could not even see Pooh from here in the thick of this group, and he would have been even more nervous and alarmed than he already was if he couldn’t hear Pooh’s voice from somewhere just up ahead, answering questions that Piglet couldn’t quite make out with responses that he couldn’t fully hear either, although he could decipher snatches from time to time. At least, Piglet reflected, Pooh did not sound at all troubled or concerned himself, and that made Piglet feel a little better, although he wasn’t sure he had ever heard Pooh sounding really afraid. The most anxious that Piglet had ever known him to be was when they were low on condensed milk or there wasn’t any honey to be had for supper. 

Big Things seldom troubled Pooh. That was why Piglet found him such a reassuring friend.

“…need to cross the stream here,” Pooh was saying, and Piglet realized they had reached the part of the stream where four big stones were laid across, providing an easy crossover to the field where many of Rabbit’s friends-and-relations lived. These were, in fact, called The First Stepping Stones, because they had been laid before any of the others ever were, because Rabbit had such a stornry number of friends-and-relations. Piglet wondered if any of them were about or if they were all gathered at Rabbit’s house. He wondered if they were likely to be scared of the large tall animals.

“Right then,” said Mauhúr. “You first, Warrung.” The biggest of the animals nodded and stepped quickly across the stream. After him went Durzlip and Noglash. Mauhúr looked down at Pooh, who looked disturbingly small beside him. “Now you, and I shall follow along behind you.

“Right behind me?” Pooh asked him.

“Oh yes,” said Mauhúr.

“All right,” said Pooh, and he turned and started across in his funny familiar way: right foot on the first stone, left foot held out at an angle, leg bobbing briefly before he hopped to the next, and the one after that, as Mauhúr followed behind.

Piglet looked back at his shoulder at the rest of Mauhúr’s friends. Three of them, the three small ones of the group, were looking at the water with some dismay. The fourth was looking at him. “Well then, little one,” it said in a quiet but somehow very unpleasant voice. “I guess it is your turn now, little pig.”

“I’m Piglet,” said Piglet indignantly, and he turned back in the direction of the stream. With a hop and a skip and a jump and a hop, he was soon standing in the tall grass on the other side. 

Straightaway he went to Pooh, who patted him amiably on the arm, and Piglet was immediately much more comfortable. He looked back to see if the Rude Animal had followed him – the same, he recalled with severe displeasure, who had asked if Christopher Robin had hairy feet! – and was surprised to see that all four of the other animals were still on the other side of the stream, none of them having made a move to cross. Evidently there was disagreement among them as to who should go next. 

The discussion was growing animated when Noglash stepped forward. “Hi!” he shouted. “If you snaga ****** don’t bring your chicken-livered carcasses across quick smart I will come back there and help you!”

Piglet stared at him openmouthed, but evidently that was the encouragement they needed, because one of them squealed and tried to run across. (He might, Piglet thought afterward, have had some other form of Encouragement that Piglet could not see, because the Rude Animal was standing immediately behind him.)

There Was A Loud Splash.

Noglash cursed and leaped back to avoid the plume of water, but he was laughing at the same time, as were Mauhúr and Durzlip and Warrung, and the animals on the other side of the stream as well. The one in the stream was not laughing, though. He looked wet and miserable, and Piglet’s sympathies were instantly engaged. “That’s not funny!” he squeaked, and he ran forward to help the poor unfortunate, although when he had reached the edge of the stream he soon saw that there was not much he could offer in the way of practical assistance, being so much smaller, so he could only stand there wringing his hands and saying Friendly Helpful Things as the other creature clambered, sopping, up onto the bank. 

“Hey, Reznib, thought you’d try for a little dip, eh?” jeered Durzlip, and Mauhúr, although he said nothing, was openly smirking.

“Are you all right?” asked Piglet anxiously. Reznib only hung his head, muttering to himself, as he slopped through the grass past Piglet. The stream was not very deep, but most of him was still extremely damp, and his lower half was obviously wet all the way through. Piglet could see the outline of Reznib’s skinny legs and bottom through his sodden trousers, and he wondered at the sight with some astonishment. He had never seen anyone so thin. The four big animals, with their muscular, leather-clad bodies, looked fit and well-fed, but the three smaller animals looked starveling and spindly.

The eighth and last of them to cross the stream was the unpleasant creature from before. He was middling in size (somewhere between the stature of what Piglet thought of as the larger four and the smaller three) but he was broadly built, with widely spaced shoulders and long arms that hung almost to the ground, like an ape that Piglet had seen a long time ago in one of Christopher Robin’s picture books. As Piglet stared at him, he stared back in a way that made Piglet want to be almost anywhere else. He turned, thinking to run in the direction of Pooh again.

Instead he ran smack into Reznib, who had stopped a short distance away and had taken off his wet shirt to wring it out. Reznib was bigger than Piglet, but he still hissed at the sudden impact of Piglet’s body. “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Piglet, “I didn’t mean to – ”

“Oh, *** off,” snapped Reznib, pulling away. 

He was bigger than Piglet, and his voice was harsh and raspy, but he did not seem as scary as the others. Looking at his wet clothes and his poor exposed gray ribs, Piglet felt terribly sorry for him. “Would you like my scarf?” he offered bravely. 

Reznib had not been looking at Piglet, but now his head swung toward him, his face overtaken by obvious surprise. “Why would you give me that?” he asked, plainly baffled, as Piglet, with sudden determination, unwound it from around his neck.

“To dry yourself off, of course, or as much as you can, anyway,” said Piglet. Adding quickly: “I know it’s not much, but it’s all that I have. Please, you have to take it – you’re so wet! I expect Rabbit will have something bigger that he can give you when we reach his house.”

Reznib blinked at Piglet’s earnest face and at the length of thickly woven green fabric that was being offered to him. Finally, gingerly, he took it into his dark claws, handling it in a delicate way, as if he thought that it was going to bite.

-.-.-.-

“We’re Orcs!” said Reznib, surprised by the question. Piglet had finally worked up the courage to ask him what kind of animal they were.

“What are Orcs?” asked Piglet, who had never heard that word before.

“Orcs are what we are,” answered Reznib, shrugging.

“Oh,” said Piglet. Hesitating: “…but you don’t all look the same?” he said in a Questioning Sort of Way.

“We’re from different places.”

“I see,” said Piglet, and he gave a careless shrug of his own and pretended that this had answered his question, since it was evidently all that he was getting. “And what is it that you’re doing here?” he asked.

“We’re lost, I suppose,” said Reznib. “That’s the whole reason Mauhúr was interrogating you, and why he wants to talk to this Rabbit person. He’s trying to find out where we are.”

“You’re in the Hundred Acre Wood,” Piglet told him.

Reznib rolled his eyes. “Yes, you only told Mauhúr that about ten times.”

“I said it three times,” Piglet corrected him. “And Pooh said it twice.”

Reznib snorted. “Anyway, don’t you see, that doesn’t tell us anything! We’re obviously somewhere on the edge of Fangorn, but everything’s turned around – we can’t even tell if we’re in Rohan or in Gondor. There’s a war on where we’ve just come from, and if these lads – ” jerking his head up at the larger animals, “can’t get to where they’re going, things are liable to go all cockeyed.”

“Ah,” said Piglet.

“And you needn’t go acting as if you understand me, since it’s obvious enough that you don’t.”

“…” said Piglet, looking down at the ground and kicking a pebble.

They were outside of Rabbit’s house, but Rabbit wasn’t home, and Pooh surmised that he was most likely off handing out invitations. Under other circumstances Mauhúr would have stormed into this Rabbit person’s home anyway to secure it and set up a Base Of Operations while they waited for his arrival, but since the entrance amounted to a hole in the earth and the Uruk-hai were all too big to fit through, they had settled for keeping guard on the burrow instead. 

Which was very sensible of them, Piglet had told Reznib confidingly, because one time Pooh had tried to leave after a prolonged time at Rabbit’s table and had found himself wedged stuck in the hole, and had been forced to wait until he lost enough “middle” to be pulled out again.

“But I guess you wouldn’t have that problem,” said Piglet to Reznib.

Reznib blinked at him. “Why do you keep looking at me like that?” he asked.

“Like what?” asked Piglet.

“I don’t know, like that,” said Reznib. He was not often the object of anyone’s pity and so he didn’t know enough to recognize it when he saw it. All he knew was it was making him uncomfortable.

“That’s true enough,” said Noglash unexpectedly, choosing this moment to show that he was eavesdropping. “These snaga are scrawny enough to fit where we can’t, right Mauhúr?”

Mauhúr turned toward them, looking thoughtfully at Reznib, Jashit, and Shagrub. “Well lads,” he said, “it looks like the time has come for you to start earning your keep.”

“…wait,” said Piglet, who had the feeling that something unpleasant was about to happen. “You don’t really mean to go in when Rabbit’s not here, do you?” 

Reznib had turned away from him and Shagrub had stepped up close to the door, running his fingers thoughtfully over the hinges. They were bright brass hinges, very new looking and shiny. Rabbit had only had a proper front door put in a few years ago, to present an attractive front to the Neighborhood, and to keep out the Wrong Sort of Animal. Piglet knew that he was very proud of it. 

“But it’s not polite!” he squeaked.

“Polite, he says!” mocked Noglash, and the others laughed.

“Pooh!” said Piglet, looking at Pooh. “Tell them they can’t!” They both knew how very fond Rabbit was of his front door.

“…Tell them they can’t what?” asked Pooh. He had stopped paying attention to what was going on a while ago, thinking instead of the rumble in his stomach and how he really wished that they could be on their way to Kanga’s, rather than waiting outside of Rabbit’s round front door for who knew how long it would take Rabbit to come back.

“Can you take off the hinges?” Reznib was asking Shagrub.

“Why bother about that?” scoffed Noglash, stepping forward purposefully. “Get back, you little maggots. It only wants a good kick…”

“Haven’t you tried opening it?” Pooh asked with some surprise.

Noglash, who was just drawing back his foot preparatory to smashing in Rabbit’s front door, stopped and stared at him, then looked at Mauhúr. Mauhúr seemed equally surprised, but he nonetheless nodded at Shagrub, who had got well clear of Noglash’s evil foot (he’d had more than enough of that back in Fangorn, thank you very much) but now edged forward and turned the smartly polished doorknob. The door swung smoothly outward on lovingly oiled hinges. “It wasn’t even locked,” Shagrub announced, greatly amazed at this.

“Why didn’t you say something before?” Mauhúr demanded of Pooh.

“You didn’t ask,” said Pooh reproachfully.

“But Pooh, you must tell them they can’t go in! Rabbit will be upset if he knows people are going into his house when he isn’t there.” Piglet looked with dismay at the three goblins who were already disappearing into the darkness of Rabbit’s neatly appointed little burrow.

“Now now,” said Mauhúr, addressing himself to Pooh, who showed signs of listening to Piglet’s obvious concern. “There’s no need to worry about any of that. We aren’t going to do anything unseemly. My lads are just going to look the place over so they can assure me there aren’t any unpleasant…surprises.”

“Oh yes?” said Pooh. “That doesn’t sound like it should be too bad, then.”

Piglet flinched at the sound of the first loud crash from within.


	7. In Which Rabbit Comes Home to Discover Some Unexpected Guests.

You may be wondering why Rabbit was so short with Pooh and Piglet earlier, and why he didn’t invite them to his party. It didn’t occur to Pooh or Piglet to wonder about this because they were so Cheerfully Employed when they spoke with him, but I’m sure it occurred to you, and here is the reason. Rabbit was quite fond of parties and had planned (well, HELPED to plan) (well, helped to deliver invitations) for any number of parties in the past. But these had always been for Pooh or Piglet or People Like That, and it happened the other day that several of Rabbit’s younger relations had commented, rather sadly, that no one had ever thrown a party for Them; and Rabbit was determined to rectify this. 

And that is why he was throwing a Friends-and-Relations Party for friends-and-relations of Rabbit.

Rabbit was pleased. He had been all up and down and right and left of the entire Hundred Acre Wood, and he had been to see everybody that he intended to see, with a very few exceptions, such as Alexander Beetle, who always stayed home with his Aunt, and Very Small Beetle, who was Unpredictable and never quite where you expected to find him. Aside from exceptions like these, and of course people like Pooh and Piglet and Owl and so on, there was no one that Rabbit could think of who he hadn’t already spoken to, and he was eager to get back to the sandy bank where his hole was and prepare for the arrival of his guests.

“…and then I turned and looked, and I said to myself, ‘That can’t be Rabbit, surely?’”

“I beg your pardon?” said Rabbit, stopping and looking around at the sound of his name.

“I said, ‘Surely that can’t be Rabbit, it’s going much too fast, it’s only a sort of Rabbit-shaped blur, you know.’”

“Oh, it’s you, Eeyore,” said Rabbit. “I didn’t see you there.”

“Because if it WAS Rabbit,” Eeyore continued to address the empty space at his right, “he would stop and say hallo, being of such a sociable and considerate disposition…”

“Yes, hallo Eeyore, I do see you now, hallo!”

“Oh,” said Eeyore, looking fully at Rabbit for the first time. “It is you, then, Rabbit, after all.”

There was a silence. Rabbit, feeling his duty incumbent upon him, was the first to break it. “And how are you doing, Eeyore?” he asked politely.

“Can’t complain, I guess,” said Eeyore. “Whatsoever our station in life, there will always be those of greater or humbler estate, etcetera and so on. I expect there are even some people who might wish they had my problems, few though such persons may be. …It Shocks You, doesn’t it?” he asked, looking at Rabbit expectantly

“I can’t say it does, no,” said Rabbit.

“Hmm,” said Eeyore. “Only imagine, though: that blur I noticed earlier, the one that looked like you. I could almost swear I heard it talking to someone and saying that you were having a party this afternoon, but I know that can’t be true. I told myself, If Rabbit was going to have a party, which I very much doubt, I am sure that I would have heard about it from Rabbit himself, because Rabbit is someone who Tells People These Things, someone who Lets People In.”

Now Rabbit found himself in a predicament. It was true, he hadn’t especially been planning to invite Eeyore to the afternoon’s event, in fact he had deliberately skirted Eeyore’s rather sad and boggy spot to the southeast of the Wood so as to avoid that very thing, and he certainly hadn’t expected to find the old donkey so far afield on this bright sunny day. Nonetheless, here was Rabbit, and there was Eeyore, eying him with obvious expectation, and Rabbit sighed within his innermost being. If he tried to explain about the Friends-and-Relations Party for friends-and-relations, He Just Knew that it was not going to Come Out Right. It might have done with Pooh or Piglet, who were neither of them apt to suspect a slight – but Eeyore was Another Matter, and so of course Rabbit knew what would have to happen. 

“But Eeyore,” he said, “I AM having a party this afternoon. In fact, I was just coming to find you, and ask if you would like to come to it.”

“Were you?” said Eeyore, in a tone of some surprise.

“Yes, yes I was.”

“If I would like to come to your party?”

“That’s right, exactly.”

“Well now,” said Eeyore. “Let me think about this…” He fell silent as Rabbit waited on his reply. “Yes, I think I can do that. Yes. I definitely believe that I should be able to come to your party. Thank you, Rabbit. What a kind and generous offer.”

Rabbit nodded quickly and prepared to dash off.

“But when is the Momentous Occasion to be, Rabbit?” asked Eeyore. “After all, it is past noon now.”

“Is it?” Rabbit’s whiskers twitched. “How time does fly.” Reluctantly: “Perhaps you’d like to keep me company as I go back to my burrow.”

“I shouldn’t like to put you to any trouble,” said Eeyore, and Rabbit’s whole body stiffened in anticipation of flight, “ – but I know that you’ll say it isn’t any. Very well, I will accept your offer, dear Rabbit. I expect, with the two of us in tandem, the walk will pass very pleasantly.”

-.-.-.-

By the time they had reached the field where Rabbit made his home, he had the beginnings of the most awful headache. Oddly enough, Eeyore had predicted just that thing at the start of their walk.

“It’s a fine day for a walk, isn’t it?” Rabbit had said, who had resigned himself to the reality of Eeyore’s company and was now determined to make small talk. “The weather is very clement.”

“Yes, spring is here and all the flowers in bloom,” said Eeyore gloomily. “My allergies always come out this time of year.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes, dear Rabbit. Sneezing, wheezing, running at the nose, and the most appalling headaches you can imagine.” Eeyore swung his head sideways to look at Rabbit.

“Goodness, how awful,” said Rabbit obediently. Gratified, Eeyore began letting him know about all of the other plants and weather conditions that triggered his allergies, and Rabbit, who was initially listening out of only one ear, began to take a greater interest as he found himself recognizing some of the symptoms that Eeyore spoke of. He was just beginning to wonder if there really was such a thing as an allergy to Fresh Air and Sunshine, when his ears suddenly shot up to full attention. He stopped and rose up as high on his hind legs as he was able, looking out over the grass in the direction of his burrow.

“We’re not there yet, Rabbit,” said Eeyore kindly. “We’ve at least another fifty meters to go.”

Rabbit took no notice of this. “Who on earth is that?” he asked no one in particular, puzzled and a bit alarmed at the sight of several Very Tall And Very Odd-Looking People in the vicinity of his front door.

“Ah,” said Eeyore, “that I couldn’t say.” Disapprovingly: “As I’m sure you’re aware, not all of us have the ability to stand up on our Own Two Feet, as it were. Not that you would have much cause to remember – “

“Excuse me,” said Rabbit, and he dashed on ahead through the grass until he had reached the sandy area at the front of his front door, maintaining a Prudent Space from the Four Very Tall, and One Somewhat Shorter, strangers who were standing with Pooh and Piglet.

“Hallo Rabbit,” said Pooh, noticing him at once. “We’ve brought some company,” gesturing vaguely at the strangers.

“…This is Rabbit?” said the tallest of them in a blank sort of voice.

“Yes, I am Rabbit, thank you, and To Whom Do I Have The Pleasure Of Speaking?” said Rabbit in his Formal Voice. Then: “…why is my front door open?” he faltered, looking through the cluster of strange dark legs.

“Oh this is ridiculous,” snapped another of the strangers, looking at his companions angrily. “You’ve got to be ******* with me…”

All of the fur rose up on Rabbit’s back. He had no idea what the large animal had just said, but he did not like it. “Are these…friends of yours, Pooh Bear?” he asked, looking at Pooh.

Pooh shrugged. “We found them, or they found us, I’m not sure which just now. They’re lost, and they’re trying to find out where they are, and how to get back to where they were.”

“They Interrorated us!” chimed in Piglet, and, looking up at one of the animals: “Are you going to Interrorate Rabbit too?”

A crash came from inside of Rabbit’s house. His head snapped toward it and abruptly he darted between the legs of the four tall strangers, who all jumped out of the way, startled by the sudden movement and saying more of those Awful Words, to see what was happening inside his beloved home.

The first thing he saw was a terrifically ugly animal, somewhat bigger than himself, though not so big as the Things outside, up on his nicely upholstered velvet footstool, pawing over the neatly arranged china that he had lined up on the wooden shelves along the far back wall. Another of the Things was up on his bed and had slit the full length of his beautifully quilted comforter (the one with the blue and red diamond pattern, stitched especially for Rabbit by his Second Favorite Aunt) from top to bottom, and so there were a great many downy feathers flying about.

“Who – ” said Rabbit, “what – ” He sneezed as a feather landed on his nose. “…What DO you think you are doing? Who said that you could come into my home? Stop this at once!”

A third ugly head popped out from beneath his bed, looking at him with eyes that shown like great round torches, glowing with a hellish light. “Oi,” it said in a gravelly voice. “Is that a rabbit?” it said.

Rabbit suddenly found himself the object of two more pairs of enormous glowing eyes. He swallowed and fell back a step. The third creature crawled out from under the bed, while the first one hopped down from the footstool on which it had been standing. There was a belated crash as a blue Wedgwood bowl that had been in Rabbit’s family for many years, knocked sidelong by the thing’s careless shoulder, smashed to the floor. The culprit paid no mind to the damage it had just done; it paced up alongside of the third creature, still looking at Rabbit. “Here, Shagrub,” it said, “you don’t really s’pose it can be anything else, looking at those ears?”

“He’s a big one, isn’t he,” said the one on the bed, and he jumped down as well. He was still holding the knife in his hand.

“I like rabbit,” said Shagrub, taking a step toward Rabbit. “Smells like a Real rabbit, too. What do you reckon, Jashit? D’you reckon he’s big enough for all of us, then?”

“Big enough and to spare, yeah,” said Jashit, fingering his knife. “Big enough and to spare.”

-.-.-.-

Outside of the burrow, the Uruk-hai were muttering amongst themselves. Noglash had bit his tongue all the while Mauhúr did business with a small round bear and a pig in a scarf, but declared now that he absolutely drew the line at taking directions from a talking rabbit. Warrung was wholly bemused, while Durzlip was wondering out loud if something had happened to them during their escape from the trees of Fangorn, and if the animals they were talking to in this strange place were actually real or if the whole thing was a sort of queer dream or imagining.

Mauhúr, listening to Noglash’s diatribe, also glanced from time to time at Durzlip as he put forward his theory. When both Uruk-hai had stopped talking Mauhúr looked again at Durzlip and said, “Put out your arm a moment, Durzlip?” After Durzlip had done so Mauhúr caught his wrist and twisted it. “…Are you imagining this, then?” he asked. He was genuinely curious, scrutinizing Durzlip’s face.

Durzlip grimaced. “Ah, no. No, I don’t think I am,” he said.

“Right then,” said Mauhúr, and he pushed Durzlip’s arm away. Durzlip fetched it up against his chest, rubbing the badly chafed skin of his wrist, as Mauhúr told them, “Right. Here is how it is going to be. I don’t much care if the answers we get come from a talking rabbit, or a talking mushroom, or my own left foot. I want Answers, real proper ones, and I want them now.”

There was a squeal and the small explosion at their feet of a prey-animal in the act of bolting. Mauhúr, reacting with the instinctive suddenness of a bear slapping a salmon out of a stream, snatched the frightened Rabbit up into the air with an easy swing. 

The whites of Rabbit’s eyes were showing and he was trembling all over, but as he swung by the scruff from Mauhúr’s grip he glared with all of his might at the watching Orcs. “Horrible!” he gasped out. “I’ve never – not in all my days – ”

“You’re Rabbit?” Mauhúr asked him. “…Splendid. I am Mauhúr, and these are my friends, and we are all going to have a little chat.”


	8. What Happened To Eeyore.

Piglet had never admired anyone in his entire life more than he admired Rabbit during his Interroration. Despite his obvious fear, Rabbit never stopped glaring at the Orcs who had captured him. After Mauhúr set him on the ground he did not try to run again, but only looked at the interlopers with utmost contempt, all the while that he was answering their questions. 

Unfortunately, Mauhúr did not seem to be like his answers any better than his attitude. The world Rabbit lived in was a small one, circumscribed by the people he knew and a few beloved landmarks, sprinkled through and around a peaceful, unassuming little wood. Names like “Rohan” and “Gondor,” “Eriador” and “Mordor,” meant nothing to him in the slightest, and he wasn’t remotely embarrassed to announce his ignorance of them.

“Don’t you know ANYTHING about the larger world beyond these precious woods of yours?” Mauhúr growled at him once, and Rabbit gave him a Withering Look, a look that discerned all that was ugly and vulgar, all that was dirty and violent and cruel, about Mauhúr and his ilk.

“Sir,” he said, his voice laden with scathing indictment of a world that could produce such wretches. “Why would I ever want to?”

He was utterly magnificent, and Piglet, looking at the brave Rabbit he had known so long with newly opened eyes, could not have been prouder of him.

“We’re wasting our time,” said Noglash disgustedly after some time had passed, during which Mauhúr had not been any better satisfied by anything Rabbit had to say. “It’s plain he can’t tell us anything worth a dog fart. I say we roast him.”

Eeyore, who hadn’t spoken a word up to this point, let out a long huff of air. “Roast our Rabbit?” he said in a tone of frank disbelief. “Utterly preposterous.”

Noglash’s lip curled with disgust. The small gray donkey, which seemed to move and speak at the speed of a stone rolling uphill, had ambled up some minutes into Mauhúr’s interrogation of Rabbit and had sat plumped down on its hindquarters for all that followed, its heavy gray head swinging slowly as it looked from one speaker to the next. Noglash, thoroughly fed up with the unending stream of insipid talking animals they kept encountering, had endeavored to ignore it for some time. Now he turned toward the donkey, his hand sliding down over the hilt of his sword.

His body turned toward the donkey, but his head turned toward Mauhúr.

Mauhúr did not mistake his gaze. He looked at Eeyore, then Rabbit, and then he looked at Noglash again. “Maybe,” he said placidly, “a small demonstration would not go amiss, Noglash.” He gave a horribly casual shrug.

Durzlip grinned. “I’ll make the fire,” he said.

Piglet clutched convulsively at Pooh’s arm. “Oh Pooh,” he wailed. “This is awful. They can’t burn Rabbit!”

“It’s all right, Piglet,” said Pooh, reassuring him. “I’m sure they aren’t going to do something like that.”

“Oh no?” said Noglash, leering at him. “Watch us.”

“This grass is dampish,” announced Durzlip. “We’re going to want proper wood.”

“No worries on that score,” said Mauhúr, looking at Rabbit’s front door.

A frown was growing on Pooh’s soft furry face. He was, as has often been said of him, a Bear of Very Little Brain, but it seemed that the full seriousness of the situation was starting to register with him. “But of course you won’t do it,” he said slowly, looking up at Noglash. “Because it would hurt him.”

“And that is exactly the point,” said Noglash with relish, and he turned to Rabbit’s front door, lining up his foot with it. He gave the wooden façade a small playful kick, just a love tap really, with the steely toe of his boot, and then he drew himself back. The animals, who either did not believe what they were seeing or perhaps expected him to soften, neither moved nor spoke, and so this time nothing stopped Noglash from doing as he wished. 

One devastating kick and Rabbit’s beautiful front door splintered inward.

Burying his face against Pooh’s front, Piglet burst into tears.

“Here you go,” said Noglash cheerfully, looking at Durzlip. “That should be all the fuel you need.”

“This paint should catch nicely,” said Durzlip as he formed his little pile of kindling. He pulled steel and flint from a fold within his tunic and set about trying to kindle a flame.

“I really liked that front door,” muttered Rabbit with a degree of understatement that was either meant to display heroic nonchalance in the face of personal danger, or just a state of complete and total shock.

“That’s enough,” said Eeyore, getting ponderously to his feet. “You’re going to Stop now, and you’re going to Leave.”

“Why? Who’s going to make us? You?” scoffed Noglash. Durzlip looked up with amusement from the start of his fire and Mauhúr arched a prominent eye ridge at Eeyore. None of the Orcs had eyebrows.

Eeyore’s tail was lashing behind him as if at the attentions of a particularly annoying fly, but his front half looked wholly untroubled. “Yes,” he said simply.

Noglash took the burning brand that Durzlip handed him, and looked at Eeyore with fierce pleasure. “Then you can burn,” he announced, and thrust it at the hapless donkey.

Eeyore turned aside slightly as Noglash forced the makeshift torch against his body. It caught him at the juncture of neck and shoulder, and a quick flame licked up over his shoulder to catch in his short, bristly black mane. As quickly as that, Eeyore was on fire. Rabbit shouted, and Piglet screamed, and Pooh stared in blank horror, but Eeyore stood burning as he faced Noglash’s horrible laughter.

That laughter weakened and died as flames rose and the donkey did not scream or run or fall as he had expected, but only kept facing him instead, and then slowly, horribly, began to move forward. “What the ****?” said Noglash, starting to back up.

“Don’t Mind Me,” a voice came tonelessly out of the flames as the burning donkey advanced on Noglash. “I’m Only On Fire…”

“Bleeding Eye!” shouted Durzlip, scrambling to his feet.

“Mother of ****!” exclaimed Mauhúr.

Noglash, who had forgotten that he was still holding the brand, yelped as it began to scorch his hand. He flung it forcefully at Eeyore, then pulled back, a look of horror on his face, as the donkey only trod it underfoot and continued to advance. “K-keep away,” Noglash gasped. “Keep away from me!” He all but stumbled backward over the snaga Orcs, who were immediately behind him and who were gaping stupidly at the sight of the walking, burning donkey.

“Oh ****, how is it doing that? Oh **** – ”

“They don’t die!” Jashit was actually laughing hysterically, “they don’t die, they don’t die, they don’t ******* die – ”

Mauhúr, never to be accused of cowardice, ran around Eeyore to push Noglash sidelong, knocking him out of Eeyore’s path. He grabbed Jashit and, stuffing the giggling snaga under his arm, turned to shout at the others. “Come on!” he yelled. “To me, to me…”

“Go, Now,” intoned Eeyore in a heavy voice.

Incredibly, They Went.


	9. In Which Rabbit Calls a Meeting, and Mauhúr and His Lads Regroup.

When the Orcs had retreated Eeyore sank down on his knees. Rabbit leapt over the burning pile that had once been his front door and raced into his burrow. “Oh Eeyore,” Piglet wept, “oh Eeyore, Eeyore…” as Rabbit ran out again, carrying his wash jug. He flung it over Eeyore, and there was a terrific hiss as a great white cloud of steam rose into the air. The bulk of the fire was extinguished, but bits of Eeyore were still burning and Rabbit, without a moment’s hesitation, flung himself against the donkey, knocking him onto his side.

As Pooh and Piglet helped him, they began to roll Eeyore back and forth on the ground to extinguish the last of the flames.

When the fire had been wholly put out, Rabbit hurried to the stream to fetch more water in his wash jug, and then it was just the three of them: Pooh sitting on the ground with Eeyore’s head in his lap, and Piglet sitting on the ground close by them. Eeyore, who had not said anything for some minutes, began to stir. He lifted his black head from Pooh’s lap and looked blindly around him. “Someone is crying,” he said. “Who is it?”

Piglet gulped and swallowed and was unable to speak. His whole body was shaking.

“Is that little Piglet I hear? …But what on earth is there to cry about?”

“Oh, Eeyore – ” (shuddering heavily) “Eeyore, they _burned_ you!”

Surprised: “And you’re crying for that, are you? Whatever for?”

“Well, it’s just…you’re all _black_ , and _burned_ , and your back is charred and crumbling, and your poor mane is completely _gone_ …”

Eeyore sighed heavily. “Will someone please explain to Piglet what happens when someone has been set on fire?” He stopped speaking then, because at that moment Rabbit came back and flung another jugful of water over him, and Eeyore was obliged to snort and splutter instead.

“There,” said Rabbit brusquely, but not unkindly. “Now the thing that we should do, I think, is to rub you down and dry you off as much as possible. Piglet, would you please get up and put out that fire in front of my burrow? I am going to go get my comforter to wrap around Eeyore, and gather an assortment of other Odds And Ends before we leave.”

Pooh’s arms were wrapped around Eeyore’s neck, his eyes closed as he pressed the side of his face against the top of the donkey’s head, but at this they opened. “Leave?”

“Where are we going?” Piglet asked, sniffling a little, as he got to his feet.

“We are going to have a Meeting, of course,” said Rabbit grimly. “We are going to discuss What Is To Be Done.”

-.-.-.-

They ran as they had run before, from the trees of Fangorn. When Mauhúr thought they were a sensible distance from the Thing at the burrow, he made them stop and pull themselves together. “We won’t get anywhere by panicking,” he said. “Let’s all catch our breaths and _think_ , for fuck’s sake.

They were at a little spinney of larch trees, nothing like the great Orc-eating trees of earlier, and there was no sight of any other form of life beside themselves. No burning donkeys, no strange little bears or talking pigs. Nonetheless, much as Mauhúr might have liked to pretend that the whole thing hadn’t happened, it would be impossible not to acknowledge it. Noglash, for starters, was plainly terrifically disturbed by what he had seen, as were the rest of them, and the goblins were holding a rapid exchange incomprehensible to anyone other than themselves. The whole shock of the affair had reduced them to dialect, a Misty Mountain/Mirkwood patois very different from the Common that was _de rigueur_ at Isengard. For the most part Mauhúr couldn’t understand it, and those bits that he did understand he did not like the sound of in the slightest.

Best nip this business of private languages in the bud, he thought, before the little swine thought to make a habit of it. “Would you care to say that to the rest of us?” he growled at Shagrub. “In Common, if you please.”

Jashit spoke up instead. “You saw it, right?” he asked Mauhúr, sounding almost tearful. “It burned, and it didn’t die.”

“FUCKING creepy,” said Reznib, shuddering. “What DOES that?”

“I know something, at any rate,” said Shagrub grimly. “I know something that burns and does not die.”

The three goblins were exchanging glances amongst themselves, to Mauhúr’s immense displeasure. This silent but obvious exchange of private knowledge was quite as bad as dialect. “And what,” he said coldly, “do you three know about, that ‘burns and does not die’?”

“Himself,” said Reznib. “His Lordship. The One Under the Mountain.” Shagrub and Jashit both nodded in agreement.

Warrung looked at the goblins, puzzled. “Isn’t that the title of the wotchercallit, that Dwarf lord up at Erebor?”

They stared at him. “…No!” said Reznib, offended.

“That’s the _King_ Under The Mountain,” Shagrub clarified.

“Right,” sniffed Reznib.

“Different mountain, different title,” Shagrub explained.

“Then what is it you lot are talking about instead?” asked Mauhúr with growing annoyance.

“His Lordship,” Shagrub intoned. “The Balrog of Moria.”

“…And who’s that when he’s at home, then?” asked Durzlip.

The goblins visited him with looks that partook equally of astonishment and disdain. “You Uruk-hai!” said Reznib. “You really don’t know nothing about anything, do you?”

“ _Oi_ ,” said Noglash. He was still looking a trifle ashen, but the sound of an uppity snaga was enough to draw his full attention. “You want to say that again, you little gobshite?”

“We’re only saying it ’cause it’s true,” said Shagrub.

“Yeah,” said Jashit, nodding.

“I mean look at _him_ ,” said Shagrub, jabbing a thumb at Jashit. “Jashit’s from fuckin’ Mirkwood an’ he still knows about the Balrog.”

“That’s right,” Jashit agreed.

“What you three know wouldn’t amount to a boot full of piss,” said Noglash.

Mauhúr cast a bemused glance at Noglash before turning back to the goblins. “I’m hearing names like ‘Balrog’ and ‘His Lordship’ and I’m not hearing much about what that actually means, so if one of you would kindly take the time to explain things to the rest of us, I’m sure we’d all be _delighted_ to hear it.”

After such an explicit invitation, the goblins were practically tumbling over themselves to fill him in. What followed for Mauhúr and his fellow Uruk-hai was an education in goblin-Orc cosmology and the hierarchy of Moria, which put Dwarves and other Intruders at the bottom, Orcs (and Trolls on occasion) in the middle, and the Balrog, a timeless demigod of shadow and flame, indisputably at the top. Mauhúr, whose assumption had always been that goblins served nothing and no one better than their snotty little chieftains, found himself grudgingly impressed by the sound of this Lord of Moria. Of course, the description – as Noglash did not hesitate to point out – was coming by way of weak and puny snaga, which made it at least somewhat suspect just on that basis. Further quizzing was plainly in order.

“So what, you serve him then, is that it?” Durzlip asked. “Give him tribute, do his bidding, that sort of thing?

“Nar, he don’t really work like that,” said Reznib, shrugging.

“Yeah. He keeps to himself, mostly,” said Shagrub. “Comes out sometimes on special occasions.”

“But you’ve at least seen him, right?” asked Mauhúr.

“Oh yeah!” said Reznib emphatically, and he looked at Shagrub for corroboration.

Shagrub gave an obliging nod. “He carries a great whip of many thongs, and a sword like a stabbing tongue of fire,” he intoned. “His mane streams out behind him like a great river of fire, an’ his wings fill up a whole cavern.”

Reznib frowned. “Our Balrog don’t have wings.”

“Yeah he does.”

“Shagrub, mate. I’ve seen him as well, an’ he don’ have any fuckin’ wings.”

Shagrub folded his arms across his chest. “Then what’s that business he’s got all spread out behind him, like?”

“It’s his shadow,” said Reznib firmly.

Shagrub scoffed. “You go on. No shadow looks like that.”

“ _Think_ about it, Shagrub. He’s in a fuckin’ cave. What good are wings gonna do him?”

“Well they look very impressive for one thing, don’t they?”

Mauhúr, listening to this debate, was losing faith by minute, and Noglash had no problems expressing his profound skepticism on the matter. “You can’t even agree on what this Balrog of yours is supposed to look like,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It all sounds like a great load of superstitious nonsense to me.”

“Oh, bugger you, Noglash. You can say what you like: we may not agree on every little particular, but we know what’s important,” said Reznib.

“He’s the Lord of the fucking Underworld,” said Shagrub, nodding.

“I’m confused,” said Warrung, who had not said anything for some time but who chose this moment to speak up. “Why were we talking about your weird fire god in the first place? Is it because that thing Noglash lit up…?”

Noglash hissed.

“It Didn’t Die,” said Jashit.

“And what,” snapped Noglash, rounding on him, “is that supposed to mean!”

“Don’t ask us what it means!” said Shagrub. “Look, I’m not saying nothing, I’m only saying!” They stared at him rather blankly for this, and Shagrub blinked himself but went on: “You and your lot, you think you know a good deal and maybe you’re right about some things, but me and my lot, we know a few things too. We’ve SEEN things you haven’t, and we know about a thing that burns and does not die.”

“ _Fuck_ what you think you know,” said Noglash, but his face was uneasy.

“…You know something?” said Durzlip, who had also been quiet for some minutes now. “I’m thinking a little more about this, lads. There’s something else that burns and doesn’t die, isn’t there? That, er, Eye, in Mordor. That burns too, doesn’t it?”

“What, you mean the Dark Lord?” asked Warrung. “He’s not actually an Eye, though.”

“I thought he was,” said Durzlip, scratching his neck.

“No, that’s actually more of a symbol, I think. Like how Sharkey is the Hand.” Durzlip looked at him, frowning, and Warrung snorted. “Well really! YOU’VE seen Sharkey, haven’t you? He’s not really a Big White Hand, is he?”

There were a few chuckles at this. “All right, all right,” said Durzlip. “I take your point, but still. They do go on about the Eye, you know, all wreathed in flame and that, and what with this snaga rabble talking on about their Balrog, it just got me to thinking, is all.”

“Well, there’s someone here who should know if the Eye is really an Eye or not,” said Warrung, nodding at the Orc in question.

All heads turned expectantly in the direction of Grishnákh, who was standing somewhat apart from the rest of them. His hand was curled over the Eye token at his throat, and he was looking off through the trees with a half-lidded expression.

There was a silence.

“Erm,” said Durzlip. “Grishnákh?

Further silence. “ _Hoi_!” said Mauhúr sharply. “Grishnákh!”

Grishnákh’s eyes opened fully and he turned his head slowly toward Mauhúr. “What,” he said.

“So good of you to join us,” said Mauhúr icily. “Where WERE you just now?”

“Oh,” said Grishnákh, “I was only thinking, you know.”

“What?” barked Noglash. “Thinking about what?”

“I was thinking,” said Grishnákh, casting a baleful look around him, “that you are all fools.”

Noglash snarled, but Mauhúr only shook his head. “Wonderful,” he said flatly. “If this is the wisdom Mordor has to offer, I’m just as happy to remain a fool with Saruman. Well, if you really have nothing better than that to share with us – ”

“Oh,” said Grishnákh, narrowing his eyes, “I definitely have more.”

Mauhúr turned and trained a look of exaggerated interest on him. “Really,” he said. “Do go on.”

“Fools and cowards,” Grishnákh obliged him, looking around at them again. “The donkey wasn’t a threat, and you ran from it as if from all the hosts of Elves and Men combined.”

“I seem to recall you running as well,” Mauhúr commented.

“ _Sha_. _My_ choices, under the circumstances, were limited. Yes, I could have held my ground and lost the lot of you to your cowardly rout, but I chose to follow and provide some guidance when you recovered your wits. I shudder to think of you stumbling through these woods on your own, done in by all of your confused bumbling.”

Mauhúr stepped in close to Grishnákh. The Mordor Orc’s head was just level with the hollow of the Uruk’s throat. “Take care, Grishnákh,” said Mauhúr, speaking quietly as he looked down. “I have some patience, but it is dwindling.

“There are things more frightening than you, Mauhúr,” said Grishnákh, looking up at him, his pale eyes half-lidded again. “But it is _possible_ that I choose my words too carelessly. Believe me when I say that I do not wish to offend you.” The glare accompanying these words did not lend itself to supporting this claim and none of them, least of all Mauhúr, believed him for a moment, but that did not stop Grishnákh. “You have obligations to your – ” his lip curled a little as he spoke the word, “ _master_ , and I have mine. We neither of us know where we are just now, and as neither of us can discharge our duties at present, of course there is going to be some strain.”

Mauhúr lifted his chin at this grudging non-apology, though he continued to stand where he was. There was a pause, and Grishnákh was the first to give way, but as he stepped back he gave an odd mocking flourish of his hand that did not yield any ground at all.

Reznib looked back and forth between the Uruk and the Mordor Orc. “Well then, er…”

“What now?” asked Warrung. They had waited silently through the posturing between Mauhúr and Grishnákh, watching to see if it would build up to an actual challenge. It had not, and all of the Orcs – Uruk-hai and goblin-Orc alike – were uneasy and nervous, waiting for direction.

Mauhúr glanced at Grishnákh, seeing the small tight smile on his face. That smile was maddening and Mauhúr found himself itching to ask, mockingly, what the great Grishnákh thought they should do. He knew, though, that if he did it would only backfire on him. Grishnákh’s tongue was clever: dangerously so. He would answer the question in earnest, gain ground by making some confounded sense in the process, and in so doing, he would begin to lay a foundation for persuading all of them to favor his words over Mauhúr’s.

Mauhúr was an Orc of intelligence, but his personality was a straightforward one. He knew that he did not have the same level of subtlety as Grishnákh. He realized suddenly that he would need to walk carefully here if he was to retain unquestioned authority over the group. It was not merely important, it was crucial. He _had_ to preserve that authority if he was going to protect his lads – Warrung, Durzlip and Noglash – and, yes, even keep the snaga Orcs safe as well: suitably subdued while still listening to his words, and seeing the merit in them.

Mauhúr needed to maintain his authority as Captain if he was going to keep all of them alive.

-.-.-.-

It was a strange sight that greeted those of Rabbit’s friends-and-relations who made the journey to Rabbit’s house that afternoon, in the expectation of Cake and Party Hats and Conviviality. There was surprised milling at the charred wreckage of his front door, and much murmuring over the disarray to be seen within his burrow from the open entryway. However, nobody felt right about going in to observe the damage more closely without Rabbit around to tell them that they could.

Most of them would not have wanted to do anything like that in the first place. Many of Rabbit’s friends-and-relations were small creatures of Timid Aspect and Shy Demeanor, with a naturally keen sensitivity to danger and a wariness of strange or confusing situations. Many of them also had keen senses of hearing and smell, and they detected an alarming odor about the place (beyond even the aroma of burnt paint), which put them right on edge. It was the scent of a Strange Animal, unknown to any of them, that had been present in some numbers only a short while before.

Rabbit had not left them entirely without anything to go on. Those who looked found a note that had been left just outside of the burrow on beautiful ivory stationary, carefully laid on a dish of white china with a tasteful pattern of flowers around the edge, a handsome glass paperweight on top of the note to pin it in place. From time to time a Friend or Relation would pick up the paperweight, and gentle paws or careful claws would smooth over the creamy paper, tracing out the legend printed in large black letters:

**ME ETING AT WOLS**

Though many of Rabbit’s friends-and-relations could not read or even name all of their ABCs, the presence of a “W” in the message was still enough to tell them where Rabbit had gone and where he expected them to join him, and for those who were somewhat more literate, the promise of “ETING” helped to temper their unease.

Owl had once lived at The Chestnuts, “an old-world residence of great charm,” near the center of The Hundred Acre Wood and somewhat to the north of the stream bounding Eeyore’s Gloomy Place. After the events of a certain Blusterous Thursday, when The Chestnuts had blown down, he had moved into a new and very grand residence in the middle of a beech tree to the far west outside of the Wood, where Piglet had once lived himself before he was invited to live with his dear friend Pooh. There was an old broken sign by the house that said “TRESPASSERS W,” and when Piglet had lived there it was short for his grandfather, TRESPASSERS WILLIAM. Now that Owl lived there it was short for TRESPASSERS WOL.

Owl had found it odd to realize that he had a first name at such a late and respectable stage in life, much less that it should be the same first name as Piglet’s grandfather, but he had since come to be quite proud of it because it was now the longest word that he could spell. However, he was still gracious enough to answer to Owl, and so that was what everyone called him.

Owl had been surprised when he heard the firm rap of his knocker that afternoon. He had not been expecting to receive visitors. He was further astonished to discover his neighbors Pooh and Piglet, along with Rabbit and a heavily bandaged Eeyore, standing on his front step. Finally, he was very much amazed when he was informed that he would be hosting a Meeting in his home, to which the Public At Large had been invited. However, when Rabbit had explained the circumstances to him, Owl immediately saw the necessity.

“I say,” said he, “this all sounds very serious. And you left a note for all of your visitors at your burrow, instructing them to come here?” As eager as he was to help, he was somewhat alarmed at the logistics of accommodating Rabbit’s wide acquaintanceship.

“Yes,” said Rabbit. “But I’ve just remembered that we will also have to notify Kanga and Tigger and Roo. I didn’t go to see them this morning, and they won’t have any way of knowing what is going on.”

“Perhaps,” said Pooh, “Owl could fly to see them, because he has wings, you know, and he could tell them to come here as well.”

“That is a very good idea,” said Rabbit approvingly.

“He could also,” said Pooh in a thoughtful tone, “ask them to bring things to eat and drink, since people are likely to be hungry and thirsty after coming such a way.”

“That’s very true,” said Owl, relieved to think that his larder might not have to bear the full brunt of the Public’s Appetite.

With some eagerness: “And if he should happen to stop by my and Piglet’s house on his way back, he could collect some honey pots to bring back with him, Just In Case there is someone who might happen to want honey.”

“Er,” said Owl. He was starting to develop concerns about the likely strain on certain Necessary Dorsal Muscles. “Are they Very Large pots of honey?”

“Not nearly large enough,” sighed Pooh.

“Pooh Bear,” Rabbit told him sternly, “it is very important that Owl make great haste coming back as well as going to. Your honey pots can wait.”

“Bother,” said Pooh to himself.

“So perhaps it would be better to go now rather than later,” Rabbit told Owl with heavy import.

“Quite,” agreed Owl, and he made a swift departure before any further physical demands could be placed on him.

“Now then,” said Rabbit, “we shall wait for people to come. Is there anything I can get for you, Eeyore?” he asked solicitously.

“If it isn’t too much trouble, you might ask Owl if he could bring me some thistles,” said Eeyore, sounding all Muffly through his bandages, from where he was laying on the hearthrug under Rabbit’s ruined comforter.

“Oh,” said Rabbit, a little embarrassed. “Well. I’m afraid that he’s already gone, you see.”

“… It Figures,” said Eeyore after a moment.

“I’ll go and fetch some for you, Eeyore,” said Piglet bravely. “I know there are thistles growing in the floody place nearby.” Piglet knew the area around the beech tree very well, and he was anxious to do something nice for Eeyore, who had been through such an ordeal.

He was also, although he did not allow himself to be fully conscious of it, ill at ease in the unfamiliarity of his old home. He had not been inside it much since it had passed from him to Owl (not without Owl there at any rate, which was very different, because when Owl was there it was undeniably Owl’s), and the sight of Owl’s furniture and clocks and Uncle Robert on the wall were making Piglet feel funny. And if that wasn’t enough, he was already feeling funny just being around Eeyore himself right now, for even though the donkey spoke and sounded much as he ever had, the bandages and the charred smell about him were upsetting. All of this funniness and anxiety and the horror of recent memory hanging over them were doing unpleasant things to Piglet’s stomach.

“I don’t like the idea of you going alone, Piglet,” Rabbit told him seriously. “Not with those Fierce Bad Animals about.”

“Would you like me to go with you, Piglet?” asked Pooh.

“Thank you, Pooh,” said Piglet gratefully. “I really truly would.

Rabbit started to say something else, but Eeyore, his head lying on Owl’s hearthrug, said, “Rabbit? Let them go?” in a voice that made Rabbit give his assent.

And so Piglet and Pooh went off to find thistles for Eeyore.

As soon as the door had closed behind them, the old donkey lifted his head. “Rabbit?” he said again. “Have they both gone?”

“Yes, Eeyore,” said Rabbit.

“So we’re alone now, you and me? There’s nobody else?” There was a note of uncertainty in Eeyore’s voice.

“It’s just me, Eeyore,” said Rabbit.

“Oh good,” said Eeyore. “You see, I can’t… I don’t know if— I think I might…” He was beginning to tremble.

“Eeyore,” said Rabbit helplessly. “What should I do? I don’t… You must tell me, Eeyore. What do you want me to do?”

“I think,” said Eeyore. “If you would sit next to me. It would Help.”

So Rabbit, who never liked to stay in one place for very long at a time, sat down next to Eeyore and leaned into his side, and neither of them said anything at all.

-.-.-.-

“That should be enough,” said Pooh, as the two of them sucked on their wounded paws. They were both regretting not bringing something to cut Eeyore’s thistles with, but had pushed ahead with their plan nonetheless and gathered up a great quantity. “Isn’t it funny, Piglet, how things can turn out so differently from The Way One Expects? When you and I left the house this morning to go pick flowers – it almost seems like another day altogether, doesn’t it?”

“It does, Pooh,” said Piglet in a quiet voice. He was remembering how he had thought something similar earlier.

“I expect there’s a good Hum in that, if I take the time to think about it,” said Pooh. “Only it’s hard, you see.”

“Why is that, Pooh?” asked Piglet, sniffling a little. He was feeling the urge to cry again and trying not to. Pooh had only just finished comforting him the second time, after they had left Owl’s house but before they found the thistles. Piglet feared that if he did not stop crying, his tears would make another stream and carry them both away.

“It’s hard,” said Pooh, “because there is another Hum I want to make for Rabbit and Eeyore, because they were so brave.”

“They _were_ brave, weren’t they? Rabbit as well as Eeyore. When that horrible Mauhúr was asking Rabbit all those questions… They’re the same questions that he was asking us, and I suppose he wasn’t very nice when he was asking us either, but he was _so_ much unkinder when he was asking Rabbit. Pooh – who would ever want to be unkind to _Rabbit_?” Piglet burst out in bewilderment. It was true that Rabbit could be bossy and busy and brusque, and full of the importance of his many doings. But Rabbit was kind for all of that, and well-intentioned: he only ever meant to do what was helpful and good.

Piglet could not understand it. His mind went over it again and again, poking it as you might poke at an aching tooth, in part because it made no sense and he wanted it to make sense, and in part because it really truly Ached.

“It is very strange,” said Pooh. “If Christopher Robin was here…” But he fell silent.

“Pooh,” said Piglet earnestly. “I’m _glad_ that Christopher Robin isn’t here.”

Pooh did not say anything, but he took Piglet’s paw and squeezed it.

“All right,” said Pooh, some minutes later, when they were in sight once more of the beech tree. “I have been working on that Hum a little more, and I think that I have something.”

“Which one?” asked Piglet. “Is it the one about Rabbit and Eeyore?”

“Not yet,” said Pooh. “I mean, I _have_ been working on that, but I shall keep it for Rabbit’s Meeting. No, this is the one for you and me, about Our Day.” And he began:

“We said that  
‘We should gather forth  
Our flowers while we may  
For April showers have shown their powers  
With blossoms bright and gay.’  
But Fierce Beasts came from parts unknown  
And stole them all away.

“We said that  
‘Frightful Force has come  
Where Fierce Bad Beasts now dwell,  
But still the Sun shines down, you know,  
And all shall yet be well.’  
We Will Not Say The Day Is Done  
Nor Bid The Stars Farewell.”

“Oh, Pooh…!” breathed Piglet. He paused, then spoke up reluctantly, unable to help himself: “But I’m not sure if the last line works. It’s the sun that is shining in your Hum. Not stars.”

Pooh shrugged. “True enough, only the stars wanted to come into it as well, so I put them.”

“And…that last part isn’t true, is it? I mean, we didn’t actually say that last part, did we? ‘We Will Not Say The Day Is Done – ’”

“‘Nor Bid The Stars Farewell?’ Yes Piglet, we did,” Pooh told him. “You see, we both said it, you and I, just now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien and Samwise Gamgee for two lines in Pooh’s Hum. No prize for guessing which. Other allusions are up to the eye of the reader.


	10. In Which Measures Are Called For, and Mauhúr Opens the Door.

Of the many friends-and-relations Rabbit had given invitations to that morning, all who would actually attend the repurposed, relocated gathering had arrived by three o’clock. Two younger relations were hiding under Owl’s very comfortable armchair, with only their whiskers sticking out, and several hedgehogs were sitting next to Piglet, who shifted uncomfortably from time to time because of the Prickles and wished that he had chosen somewhere else to sit. Five baby field mice were lined up next to their mother, neatly washed in anticipation of Tea and Cake, and a red squirrel had commandeered the most ideal vantage point in the form of Owl’s umbrella stand.

Eeyore had pride of place on the hearthrug very near to where Rabbit was standing, and he would lift his bandaged head sometimes the better to hear what was going on around him, even if he could not see. Lying there swathed in Rabbit’s ruined comforter, nobly caparisoned in diamonds of Red and Blue, he was an impressive and tempting sight, and the mother field mouse had all she could do to keep her babies from climbing on him.

Owl had come back by then and was relieved at the comparatively small group that had assembled thus far in his tidily appointed home. Of course he did not say this to Rabbit, extolling rather how the Intimacy of a smaller group was a virtue that could actually stimulate greater productivity and efficiency, so long as it was conducted under the guidance of a capable and intelligent Chairperson.

He made some references to his own credentials in this regard, but if Rabbit got the hint he gave no sign of it.

Their numbers grew upon the arrival of Kanga and Roo, who counted for two more of the assembly, and Tigger, who counted for ten. After they had righted the umbrella stand, assuaged the squirrel, and picked up Owl's collection of fallen knickknacks, Kanga persuaded Tigger to settle himself at the right of Pooh, with little Roo to Pooh's left, because Roo and Tigger were apt to grow Excited when they were sitting right next to each other for Prolonged Periods.

Kanga had taken Owl's message about food and drink very seriously, and so had brought a good many excellent provisions with her. There were scones and sweets and cake and tea biscuits (still warm because they had only just been baked!), with condensed milk for the younger animals and some nice elderberry wine for their elders, and plenty of medicine for Tigger and Roo. Being a motherly sort of person, Kanga had also brought more bandages and other Considerations for Eeyore, though he rebuffed her attempts to nurse him with a show of irritation. As strategically minded as she was gentle, Kanga bided her time. She knew that it would be easier to prevail on Eeyore after the Meeting was over, when there would be no distractions, or fewer, at any rate, and she could visit her full powers of persuasion upon him.

Sensibly, Rabbit conducted the prelude to the Meeting much as he would have done his canceled Party (minus the party hats), and there was plenty of time to fill up on milk and biscuits before the Meeting was called to order.

“Now then,” said Rabbit, “it is time for us to take up The Matter At Hand, and that is the problem of the Fierce Bad Animals, or F.B.A., who have come to the Hundred Acre Wood. I must ask that any smaller animals or persons of a sensitive nature be prepared to cover their ears at certain points, because the Events we are about to relate are of a very disturbing nature. I will try to provide advisories as they become appropriate in the course of our discussion, so please listen to any warnings that I may give you during our discussion of the F.B.A.”

The mother field mouse gathered her babies together, and Kanga took careful stock of Roo and Tigger, who were both listening with great eagerness.

There followed some personal testimonials, first by Piglet and Pooh, and then by Rabbit, of what they had seen and heard and done that day: of the Interroration of Pooh and Piglet, and the second Interroration of Rabbit, and of the Thing that happened with Eeyore. Eeyore, who was not generally known for being at a loss for words, was rather more taciturn on the subject than expected. It was up to Rabbit, and Pooh and Piglet as well, to tell about how Eeyore had come to Rabbit’s defense, and how the F.B.A. had fled in terror from his Grim Tread and Ominous Visage.

“I expect it was mainly because I Was On Fire, and they didn’t want to be burnt,” Eeyore finally commented at this. “Not because of anything to do with my Vis— that is, my face.”

“But your face was on fire too, Eeyore,” Pooh pointed out, and there wasn’t really anything that Eeyore could say to that.

“And now Pooh Bear will relate a Hum for us that he has composed in Commemoration of today’s events,” said Rabbit, who was consulting the Agenda that he had made up for himself, which was essentially as follows:

  1. PRELUDE TO MEETING
  2. GENERAL ADVISORY
  3. ACCOUNTS OF THE DAY’S EVENTS (POOH, PIGLET, RABBIT, EEYORE)
  4. POOH’S COMMEMORATIVE HUM (RABBIT YIELDS THE FLOOR)
  5. LIST OF THOUGHTFUL QUESTIONS
  6. LIST OF PERSONAL SAFETY SUGGESTIONS
  7. ADDITIONAL…?



As it said that RABBIT YIELDS THE FLOOR right next to POOH’S COMMEMORATIVE HUM, Rabbit accordingly yielded the floor to Pooh, who coughed once and began.

POOH’S COMMEMORATIVE HUM 

“They said they’d make a fire and  
They’d put our Rabbit on it.  
They did not reckon wisely, for  
Eeyore would have none of it.

“They broke and burned our Rabbit’s door  
(Which made him much offended.)  
The flames leapt up, the stakes were high  
(No pun is here intended.)

“The stakes were high, the hour was grim  
When Eeyore made his showing.  
He looked right at them and he said,  
‘I think you should be going.’

“‘Ha Ha,’ they laughed, ‘and what do you  
Think you can do to stop us?”  
But Eeyore would not yield before  
The Orcs so loud and raucous.

“They lit him with a fiery brand  
And soon we were discerning  
How fire leapt up our lovéd friend –  
We saw our Eeyore burning!

“The hour was grim, the flames leapt up,  
But Eeyore still was standing.  
The wicked Orcs all cowered from  
A Donkey so commanding.

“‘Leave Now!’ he told them, and they did –  
Sing ho, for Eeyore brave!  
And sing for Rabbit, Eeyore’s friend,  
Who Would Not be their slave!”

Everybody clapped, including Rabbit, who wasn’t sure at first if he should clap for a poem in which he was being sung about, but decided that he could on the grounds that most of it was really about Eeyore. Eeyore couldn’t clap himself, of course, but Thwapped instead, meaning that his tail slowly smacked up and down on the hearthrug.

“Now I have made up a list of Questions,” said Rabbit, resuming his spot as Pooh sat down on the floor again, “for us to take into account while we discuss what we know about these Fierce Bad Animals and decide on the Measures we are going to take. _Question the First:_ Where do these Animals come from? Certainly not from around here. They did mention that they had just come from a place called Fangorn, and told Piglet that they were on their way to another place called Isengard.”

“There may be maps of each of those places,” said Owl wisely. “In Which Case, if we supply them with the directions that they’re looking for, perhaps they would leave us alone and go on their way.

“They did seem cross about not knowing where they were,” Pooh said thoughtfully.

Eeyore did not say anything at that moment, but the sound that came from behind his bandages was suspiciously like a snort.

“ _Question the Second_ ,” said Rabbit: “What _are_ the F.B.A.? They don’t look like any kind of animal I’ve ever seen. They might,” (he paused here meaningfully), “not even be English.”

“Reznib told me they were Orcs,” said Piglet, “but I don’t know what that is.”

“Perhaps he said Auks?” Owl offered helpfully. “My Aunt Hilda married an Auk, you know.”

Some confusion followed here as the mother field mouse mistook the word “Auk” for “Hawk” and became much more alarmed about the whole situation. Owl explained that Auks were not related to Hawks, except occasionally, by way of Intermarriage. He expounded at some length upon a species ranging in size from the Least Auklet to the Thick-billed Murre, but not including the Great Auk, which was Extinct, and then he went away to look for some family albums and Rabbit was able to get on with his series of questions.

_Question the Third:_ How many of these F.B.A., or Orcs, were there, and what level of threat did they pose? (“Moderately High, I should say,” remarked Eeyore drily.)

_Question the Fourth:_ Ought they to take Offensive measures against the F.B.A., or purely Defensive? (Here followed an explanation to Pooh of what Offensive and Defensive meant in this instance. Pooh thought that Offensive meant calling the F.B.A. Nasty Names, and he wasn’t certain that this was something he could actually do, Himself, Personally. “Even if they deserve it,” he said.)

_Question the Fifth:_ Where were the F.B.A. right now, and what were they doing?

_Question the Sixth:_ How might they (that is to say, Rabbit and Co.) find out this information?

_Question the Seventh:_ How were all of them to go about their lives in the meantime?

“I will say this,” said Rabbit, looking around at them. “I, for one, do not plan on Living In Fear. These Orcs are obviously vandals and hoodlums and scoundrels of the worst sort, but they haven’t reckoned on who they’re dealing with.”

“Hear hear,” agreed Owl, who came back just in time to hear this, and echoes of “Hear hear” followed from the rest of those assembled, except for Pooh, who thought they were all saying “Ear Ear” and wondered whose ears they were talking about, and – a trifle self-consciously – if those ears belonged to him.

“That isn’t to say we should act carelessly or With Abandon,” continued Rabbit. “We need to talk about how to be safe, and have a Healthy Respect for our surroundings. That means trying not to go anywhere alone, and if it is really needful to go somewhere by yourself, paying extra attention to everything around you. I have taken the liberty of drawing up a list of Helpful Suggestions, which I think should help to keep us all safe.

“ _Suggestion One:_ Don’t Go Anywhere Alone.

“ _Suggestion Two:_ If you do go somewhere alone, Be Careful, and be sure to Look And Listen All Around When You Do So.

“ _Suggestion Three: Suggestion Two_ is also good to follow if you _do_ go somewhere with someone else. See _Suggestion One_.

“ _Suggestion Four:_ If you see an F.B.A., or Orc, Do Not Try To Engage With It.

“ _Suggestion Five:_ In fact, you should probably Run Away.

“ _Suggestion Six:_ Or at least Walk Very Quickly.”

More suggestions followed, including letting others know when and where an F.B.A. was spotted. Kanga, who had been listening with a puzzled look on her face for some time now, raised her paw.

“Yes, Kanga?” said Rabbit.

“How are we supposed to let people know if we have seen an F.B.A.? You haven’t told us what these Fierce Bad Animals look like,” she said.

“I expect that goes under _Question the Second_ ,” said Pooh. “Unless it was one of the Suggestions. I forget which are which.” He was in a bit of a muddle over that, especially since it seemed that people were asking questions again now.

“They were very fierce looking,” Rabbit told Kanga, “with pointy teeth and long sharp claws.”

“Did they look like Tiggers?” asked Tigger, sounding interested.

“N-oooooo…” Rabbit answered slowly, with a wary expression on his face. Tigger had been sitting very decorously throughout the meeting, but his tail was lashing around behind him.

“They were very tall,” Pooh said.

“But not all of them were,” said Piglet. He remembered what Reznib had told him. “They come from different places. That’s why they looked different from each other.”

“Different places from Fangorn?” asked Rabbit, but Piglet didn’t know any more than that.

At this point Kanga spoke up and said again that she still didn’t have a very good idea of what these Fierce Bad Animals looked like, which was Concerning to her. There were, after all, other animals in the Wood with claws and teeth, and she didn’t like the idea of making a false report or of being alarmed unnecessarily by an F.B.A. that was really just a sort of overlarge stoat or badger. “That would only embarrass both of us,” she said.

“I have an idea,” said Pooh. “But I expect it isn’t a very good idea.”

“What is it, Pooh Bear?” asked Piglet.

“Well, if Rabbit has brought along some more of his Stationary, or if Owl has any good Drawing Paper (and some more Quills), perhaps you and I and Rabbit and Eeyore might draw what we remember of what the F.B.A. looked like.”

“! ! !” said everyone else, excepting only Eeyore, who remarked somewhat acidly that of course he _would_ take part in this little art project of theirs, but they oughtn’t to mind if it Took Him A While. (He moved his blind head from side to side as he said it.)

So Rabbit, Pooh and Piglet all got down on the floor and started to draw their pictures of the fearsome Orcs. Roo and Tigger were also very excited about the chance to draw, although they were disappointed to be told that they wouldn’t be allowed to draw the F.B.A. themselves. “You didn’t see the Orcs yourselves, of course,” explained Rabbit, “so you can’t very well say that you saw what they looked like, because that would be Misleading.” But being a considerate person, he gave them paper and pen as well, and so they occupied themselves with drawing each other instead – and, sometimes, drawing _on_ each other, or on themselves, when Kanga wasn’t looking.

“This was a very good idea of yours,” said Rabbit to Pooh while they were both making their drawings. “We can also circulate these drawings as part of the Dissemination Process, when we are telling people who couldn’t come to this meeting about all the things we talked about, and about how to watch out for these awful Orcs.”

Pooh gave a modest shrug, but felt very pleased to have come up with such a useful plan.

Piglet put a great deal of effort into his drawing. His pen was nearly as big as he was, and so he needed to use both paws to hold it properly, and he had to stand up at times to avoid Smudging; also a baby field mouse ran across the page at one point, so the Orc’s arm made a rather longer showing than intended. But finally he stood back in some satisfaction, deciding that he had done it: he had shown the true face of an Orc.

Then he looked at Pooh’s drawing and was much humbled. Pooh had drawn his Orc standing, at three-quarters profile, with little crosshatched lines on his arms and legs to show where the Shadow Bits were, indicating Volume and Proportion, and he looked fierce and grim, as if he might turn his ugly glare on Piglet at any moment. It was such an apt likeness that that it was actually possible to tell which of the F.B.A. he had been, and that was the leader, Mauhúr.

Piglet looked at his own Orc, which now looked to him more like an angry black scribble with sharp triangles for teeth. He sighed and turned it over.

“All right,” said Rabbit, who had been Ambitious and had drawn, not one, but eight Orcs all together, one for each of the eight who had threatened them. As he held up his set of stick figures he felt very proud of himself until he too saw Pooh’s drawing. Rabbit faltered, then recovered himself. “Right,” he said graciously. “Well, I guess we know whose picture we will be Posting. And now, Pooh Bear, if you would be kind enough to draw two score just like that, we should have enough to place through the entire Wood.”

It should be confessed here that Pooh, who had not expected this turn of events, Blinched. Nevertheless, with a resolve that might well serve as a model to other bears in such Grim Times, he set himself to the task of drawing more Orcs.

-.-.-.-

Mauhúr had decided that they needed to retrace their steps immediately. This was not a retreat, he told the others, only a matter of retrenching. For one thing, they needed to reestablish their bearings as best they could by recovering the most familiar ground that they could find. For another, the place they had started from when they began following the first stream, back where Durzlip had shared out their rations, had been on higher ground –

“And that,” said Mauhúr, “will give us a better vantage point.”

Even Grishnákh seemed to agree this made good sense, and so back they went along the stream, with the sun behind them, thinking to make their way to the place where things had first become Strange: when the whole world seemed to turn on its head as Fangorn spat them out.

“Oi, Reznib,” said Shagrub as they walked. “What’s that you have around your neck? Isn’t that the scarf from that little pig thing you were talking to?”

“He gave it to me, didn’t he?” asked Reznib. “Reckon I can keep it, can’t I.”

“I thought it gave it to you to dry yourself off with, though,” said Shagrub. “What’re you doing wearing it around your neck?”

Reznib shrugged. “Keeps the sun off my neck anyhow, dunnit,” he said breezily.

“Look at that tree over there,” said Warrung, pointing out a tall oak tree that he had noticed before on the other side of the stream, back when they had first come this way in the other direction. It was a funny sort of tree, quite the tallest of any that they had seen, with an Unlikely Branch, as long as the tree was tall, growing out from it.

“What about it?” asked Mauhúr, who paid attention to most things that Warrung considered worthy of comment.

“I don’t know, but I want to look at it,” said Warrung, staring at the tree.

“I suppose it shouldn’t hurt,” said Mauhúr, “but let’s go carefully, and keep a sharp lookout as we do.”

They found some more of those stepping stones and made their way across the stream. Once on the other side, they walked with confident steps but watchful eyes toward the very tall tree. When they had come to it they had to marvel, not just at the strange branch, but at how wide the oak itself was. Had they all joined hands and tried to stand around it (a funny notion, to be sure), Mauhúr did not think they would have been able to span the full circumference of its trunk.

As Warrung and he both walked around the broad tree trunk, they found a green door embedded in the gnarled gray bark on the south-facing side. When Mauhúr tried it the door would not open: not because it was locked (like Rabbit’s door, it was not), but because the grass had grown up so much in front that it was preventing the door from opening outward. Plainly no one had gone through the door, whether in or out, in a very long time.

“Shall we have Noglash make a trial of this one as well?” asked Mauhúr drily.

“Oh, I don’t think we need to do that,” said Warrung, who did not actually realize that Mauhúr was joking. For someone with such keenly attuned senses about the world around him, Warrung could be astonishingly off base when it came to reading other people. Getting down on his knees without any show of self-consciousness, he ripped some handfuls of grass away from the base of the door. “There now,” he said, as he got to his feet, brushing off his hands, “that should do it – no need to break anything…” as Mauhúr turned the weathered doorknob.

A long breath of warm air came out of the door when he had opened it, as if the tree was actually exhaling. The two Uruk-hai both stepped back and looked at one another.

“Let’s call the others,” said Warrung, and Mauhúr did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> F.B.A., or Fierce Bad Animals, should not be confused with the Fiercer Animals, of which Kanga is a member, or the Fierce Bad Rabbit, who belongs to Beatrix Potter.


	11. In Which Reznib Is Assigned a Mission, and Eeyore’s Gloom Is Slightly Dispelled.

It was the goblins that Mauhúr sent into the tree and the darkness beyond the little patch of light that extended perhaps a foot past the open door. Goblins, although they do not like the sun and blink a great deal in the light of open day, nonetheless have keen eyes and terrific vision in the dark. Although the Uruk-hai were never going to acknowledge any sort of edge that their punier counterparts might possibly possess, that did not prevent them from taking advantage of it.

Of course, had Mauhúr and his fellows really wanted to go into the tree themselves, there was nothing to prevent them from making some form of torch to light up the interior, but nobody suggested this. The short green door did not promise much room within for the four hulking Uruk-hai to maneuver. In any case, they had all had enough of fire for one day.

Inside the goblins found a little bed, neatly made with sheets, pillow and quilt. The quilt and pillow were both gray with dust. There was a big beautiful kite hanging somewhat to the right of the door, and under the kite there leaned a large umbrella, a pop gun with the cork hanging out of it, two Big Boots (big, at any rate, from the perspective of a small goblin-Orc or a six year old boy), and a rain hat resting on top of them.

Aside from the boots and the rain hat, which were respectively boot- and hat-like, the goblins were mystified as to the nature and purpose of these other items, ignoring them in favor of pawing through bed sheets and rootling around the boxes under the bed. The boxes contained jacks and marbles and Useful String and other sundry items. Not knowing what jacks were, the goblins took them for a crude sort of caltrops and pocketed them thoughtfully, along with the marbles and the string. Other objects that they found and by which they were wholly baffled included:

\- A big, red india rubber ball

\- Two old train tickets, much creased and gone yellow with age

\- An empty pot with “THE FLOATING BEAR” painted on it

\- A collection of cherry stones

\- A short jump rope with cracked blue handles

\- An old matchbox with “BEETLE” on the lid and nothing inside

\- A Special Pencil Case

Reznib and Jashit had been taking the more promising things they found to Mauhúr, waiting just outside; Shagrub brought some as well, but the third time that he entered the tree he got up onto the bed and lay back on it, giving in to the weariness pressing down on him.

“Hey Shagrub-mate, chop chop, eh? You don’t want Mauhúr to catch you lying down on the job,” Reznib whispered to him as he stopped by the bed for a moment.

“He can’t see me in here,” said Shagrub in an uninflected voice. “And I don’t feel that well, so…”

“That Grishnákh would be able to, if he takes a notion to look. Only saying, friend: I wouldn’t rest here if I were you. Getting on to dark, those Uruk-hai will want to get some kip, and then we should be able to bunk down as well.” Goblins tend to err on the more nocturnal side, for obvious reasons, but subject to the preferences of their larger fellows these past weeks, they had all been forced to adapt to an Uruk’s schedule: run-sun-fight-run in the day, and get what sleep they could after sundown.

Shagrub’s exhaustion had been a long time in the making, no different than Reznib’s or Jashit’s, but that already-weariness and the battle and the beating earlier, together with the other traumatic experiences they’d had in Fangorn and after, combined now to just about do him in. His ribs ached almost beyond fathoming. It was clear at this point that Noglash had not cracked them after all, or Shagrub would not have been getting by nearly so well, but he was still terribly bruised. He wondered what his poor sides looked like under their crude bandages.

“Let them kill me,” he muttered with self-pitying abandon. “I don’t care. It’s worth it, not having to move for a little while.” His eyes closed.

Someone else got up on the bed as well, and he opened his eyes just long enough to make out who was lying down next to him, before they closed again. _That’s right. Jashit had to climb all those awful trees earlier, didn’t he?_ Not to mention he too had suffered from the wrath of Noglash.

“You’re both going to get in trouble,” said Reznib.

“Just cover for us, Reznib, eh? We’d do it for you,” Shagrub murmured sleepily, but as he said it he had no idea what it was that they would do or why. He was too far gone to even remember what he was talking about.

Reznib stood frowning at the other two goblin-Orcs, then sighed. Piling together a few more items, he emerged into the cursed afternoon light outside of the tree.

He was trying to concoct an excuse for Jashit and Shagrub in his head, but it didn’t appear that one was going to be necessary. Noglash and Durzlip were squatting on their heels, looking through the strange artifacts that they had spread out over the grass. Grishnákh was standing a little distance off, with that queer look on his face that all of them had noticed him wearing from time to time: part bored, part distracted, and very far away. Meanwhile Mauhúr stood with Warrung, looking down into the valley.

“We should still go all the way back, I think,” he was saying, “but unless we find some fresh insight as to how we entered this place, or are able to easily find a way back through Fangorn, I think we should come here again. What are your thoughts, Warrung?”

“I think,” said Warrung, “that this spot is of much the same elevation as the place we were going back to, and that was fairly high. Look. You can see down into the valleys and the Forest below. It offers a good vantage point, and it’s more easily defended if it should come to that. We can see and hear and smell up here for miles.”

“That place we first found ourselves, I do think it was higher,” said Mauhúr. “But from what I recall, the ground was very bad there, all loose gravel and shifting stones. Not territory I’d want to hold if I was in a tight spot.” He looked at Reznib. “Oi. Mountain rat. What’s your name?”

He said it in such a matter of fact tone that Reznib realized, with some amazement, that Mauhúr wasn’t actually looking to insult him: he was using it purely as a descriptive and probably didn’t realize how disparaging he was being at all. _Typical Uruk_ , Reznib though to himself. “Sir, it’s Reznib, sir,” he said out loud.

“Reznib,” repeated Mauhúr. “And those two snaga friends of yours sleeping in the tree – what were their names again?”

“Shagrub and Jashit.” Registering what Mauhúr just said: “Er, but they aren’t…they’re not actually – ”

Warrung snorted, and Mauhúr laughed. “So you really thought the two of us couldn’t hear you from outside, eh? A lesson for you, then. Even whispering may not be effective at close range.” His tone shifted from amused to brisk and authoritative. “Reznib, I don’t care if your little friends are taking a nap. It’s probably all to the good they are doing it now, when we’re not on the run and can afford to stay in one place long enough. If they try to take advantage of my good nature later, though, we will have a problem.”

Reznib nodded quickly, feeling relieved, and also a trifle envious of Shagrub and Jashit. He wouldn’t have minded a little nap himself just then.

Mauhúr smirked, evidently guessing at his thought. “But you, little Reznib, are awake right now, and so you get the shit work. Here is what I want you to do…”

-.-.-.-

Rabbit had taken pity on Pooh somewhere around his fifteenth drawing of an Orc. “That’s enough, Pooh Bear. I think that fifteen is a Highly Respectable Number for us to start with.”

“Oh good,” said Pooh rather dreamily. Although his paw was tired, he had begun to get into a sort of Rhythm, and some of the effects were still with him. Then again, it was possible the funny feeling in his stomach was playing some part in that as well. “But if you did want me to draw some more, perhaps a little smackerel of something would help to Sustain me,” he told Rabbit. It was some time now since those biscuits of Kanga’s, and the pangs of deprivation were beginning to tell on him.

Kanga looked under the tea cloth covering her picnic hamper and said that there was more cake left, which cheered Pooh up immensely. “Should I leave the hamper?” she asked the rest of them. “It is time that Roo and Tigger and I be getting along, and we have plenty to eat back at our house.

“You will be very careful, of course,” said Rabbit sternly.

Kanga, who might otherwise have answered him sharply, recognized the same protective concern she so often felt herself, so she only told him that she would. “But it’s you I’m really worried about, Rabbit,” she told him. “Wherever are you going to stay tonight? We never talked about this in your Meeting. You can’t be going back to your burrow: not with your door gone and those Fierce Bad Orcs around.”

Of course Rabbit had been perfectly accustomed to living without a door once upon a time, as was true of many other animals in the Hundred Acre Wood, but the image of Rabbit’s ruined door, broken and burning in front of his burrow, was a distressing image and had become a kind of Symbol in all of their minds.

“I say, Kanga,” said Owl immediately. “Let’s not have any doubts on that score. Rabbit will be staying with me, of course, and Eeyore as well.” Owl had been disappointed not to be Chairperson of the (now finished) Meeting, and he had been anxious about the business of hosting so many people in his quiet bachelor stronghold. Nonetheless, a keen Civic Spirit burned within him, and he knew that offering two of his friends a place to stay would not be nearly so taxing as inviting all of them.

Rabbit thanked him very kindly for the invitation and accepted it immediately. Eeyore spoke up, but when he did so, it was to Kanga instead of Owl, repeating Rabbit’s question of earlier. “You’ll have a care then, going home again?” he asked Kanga, lifting his head and looking at her out of one eye. His other eye was hidden by the striking black eye patch she had made for it.

While Pooh had been drawing more pictures, and the mother field mouse had finally left with her babies, promising to carry news of the meeting with her, the squirrel and the hedgehogs following soon after (Rabbit’s two little cousins remaining, for now) and each of them carrying one of Pooh’s drawings, Kanga had finally prevailed on Eeyore to let her look beneath his bandages, which he assented to with bitter grace. Along with more bandages, Kanga had also brought along her little sewing kit, and after she looked at the damage to Eeyore’s face she decided that it wasn’t more bandages he needed but some snipping and stitching instead. Once she had pruned away the worst of the burnt bits she was able to find his eyes beneath them.

This was better than Eeyore himself had been able to do, and the simple discovery that he could see out of one of them had shocked him into a state of nearly speechless gratitude. The last time anyone remembered seeing Eeyore remotely like this was once, a long time ago, when Christopher Robin had reattached Eeyore’s tail after it had gone missing. Eeyore (EEYORE!) had actually gone frisking through the Wood, waving his tail behind him in a manner disquieting to anyone who knew him. That was the first time, and the only time, that Pooh had ever seen Eeyore Wildly Happy.

No one could have described _this_ burnt, bandaged creature as frisking or gay, but Pooh still recognized the Stunned Relief that Eeyore had found in the lopsided return of his sight.

Rabbit, for his part, had been with Eeyore at another extreme. Alone with him in the beech tree a bare few hours before, his arm across the donkey’s back, he had sat with Eeyore through a Darkness and a Trembling so powerful it had actually made Rabbit’s body shake as well. When he heard Eeyore telling Kanga, with Simple Amazement, that he could See, it sent a kind of pang through Rabbit’s chest, happy and painful at the same time, as he watched Eeyore gazing about him: first at Kanga, then at Rabbit, then at every other animal in the room, with the wonderment of someone seeing people he has expected never to see again.

Now, when he spoke, Eeyore’s voice was much as it usually was: heavy and a trifle gloomy, but there was an Emphasis and a Questioning in it that they were not accustomed to hearing. “You _will_ take care, then? All of you?”

“Of course we will,” Tigger immediately informed Eeyore, not waiting for Kanga to reply. “That’s What Tiggers Do Best.”

Eeyore turned his good eye toward Tigger and stared at him.

Kanga, who must have detected the thing or things that Eeyore was not saying, spoke up. “Tigger dear,” she told him mildly, “perhaps you would like to go and play with Roo and Rabbit’s little cousins.”

Once the young ones were safely removed to another area of the room, with Owl hovering anxiously nearby in the anticipation of Damages, she addressed Eeyore. “Now then, Eeyore. You heard what I said to Rabbit. I promise you, we can take care of ourselves.”

“I don’t doubt that you can, Kanga,” Eeyore told her in a lowered voice. “But Tigger, and his – Bouncing” (he shuddered a little) “isn’t going to get him very far with these Orcs. And little Roo – he’s only a Bit of Fluff, you know, no bigger than Piglet. It may be – it’s possible, mind you, that I have been very…Fortunate. Me, and You and Tigger and Pooh: we’re all much Bigger than Roo is. We can Withstand more. But Roo, he’d only go up like a sort of candle…”

“Eeyore,” Kanga told him firmly, “Roo is my baby. Tigger is like my other baby. Nothing is going to happen to them, because I Won’t Let it, any more than you would allow those Orcs to burn Rabbit.

Eeyore didn’t say anything, but putting his nose against her knee, he sighed. She patted him reassuringly.

“When I get home,” she said as she was leaving, “I will look in my felt bag and see if I have any nice scraps to patch your face and back with, Eeyore. Paisley maybe, or scarlet, or robin’s egg blue. You can’t go around in bandages forever.”

“Oo! Could we make him look like a pirate, Mummy?” Roo squeaked from her pocket. Hanging precariously over the edge to address their companion: “He _does_ look a pirate now, Tigger, doesn’t he?”

“I like the idea of Patchwork Eeyore,” remarked Pooh in a stuffy voice through a mouthful of cake.

“I Don’t,” Eeyore said.

-.-.-.-

When Kanga and Tigger and Roo left, Rabbit’s cousins went with them, along with four more Circulars about the F.B.A. That left Owl with his two guests, Eeyore and Rabbit, along with Piglet and Pooh. It was still light out when Pooh and Piglet finally left as well, although the sun, in anticipation of supper and bed, was starting to hang lower in the western sky. The shadows of the nearby trees stretched away east like long black arms, pointing in the same direction where, Piglet knew, the wicked F.B.A. were doubtless lurking. Unless they had gone.

He Hoped They Were Gone.

He and Pooh were both heavily laden: Pooh with Kanga’s hamper, and Piglet with a great sheaf of Circulars, which had a disagreeable habit of flapping back at the slightest pretext and smacking him across the face, or covering his eyes so that he could not see. It served as a Helpful Distraction, at any rate, because he was so busy shifting them in his arms or blowing them away from his eyes that he had less time to be afraid. Still, it felt like a Long While before they reached Pooh’s home under the name of Sanders.

Pooh stumped into his little den and put Kanga’s hamper down next to the table. “And now,” he said, “we can settle in for the night. It might,” he said thoughtfully, “be a good idea for me to go to my larder and count all of my honey pots. Just in case any are missing.”

“Missing?” Piglet was just putting down his papers, and his ear flicked as he turned apprehensively toward Pooh. “Why do you think any of them would be missing?”

Pooh shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. There are those Orcs out there, and it might be possible that some of them like honey.”

“But we would know if someone had been in here while we were out, surely?” Piglet, who had anticipated feeling safe when they reached home, found himself growing more anxious.

“You’re probably right,” said Pooh. “They didn’t break down the door, at any rate. I expect we would have noticed that. Would you like me to bring you some Haycorns, Piglet, while I am in my larder?”

“Oh, not just now, Pooh. I’m not hungry.” He was still well stuffed from all of Kanga’s provisions, but even if he hadn’t been, it is likely that Pooh’s Ruminations immediately previous would have turned his stomach.

_Maybe we should have offered to go with Kanga and Roo and Tigger…or maybe it would have been better to remain behind with Owl, and Rabbit and Eeyore_ , he thought unhappily. It would have been strange to sleep on the floor of his old house, but perhaps they would have been safer there.

“Piglet…” Pooh looked at him. “Are you afraid?”

“No,” said Piglet. “Perhaps a little,” he hedged. “A good bit, actually, yes,” he confessed. “But aren’t YOU afraid, Pooh?” he asked earnestly. He didn’t see how anyone could fail to be, at least a little bit.

Pooh scratched his ear. “I suppose,” he said. “But it doesn’t do to dwell on it. D’you remember, Piglet, when we were tracking those two Woozles ’round the spinney by your old tree, and it turned out to be our own tracks all along?

Piglet’s pink face turned rather pinker at the memory. Nonetheless he nodded: “Yes, Pooh.”

“And when I thought there was a Heffalump in our Heffalump trap and he had eaten all of my honey (but he hadn’t), and you came along and saw me and thought I was the Heffalump (but I wasn’t)?”

“Yes Pooh, I remember that.”

“And the time when we – ”

“Pooh,” said Piglet, “what are you trying to tell me?”

“Only that you can Worry and Worry and It May Not Happen. I think,” he said thoughtfully, “that was what Rabbit was trying to say at the meeting, about Not Living In Fear.”

“But Pooh,” said Piglet, “the bad things did happen this time, didn’t they? Rabbit’s door, and Eeyore’s poor face and back…”

“But good things happened too,” said Pooh. “Eeyore saving Rabbit, and us saving Eeyore, and Kanga patching Eeyore’s face, and all of us Coming Together to take care of each other.”

“But none of those things would have had to have happened, if it weren’t for the bad things happening first!”

“But isn’t that how it always works?” asked Pooh.

Piglet started to say something, and then he thought about it, and then he didn’t say anything after all. Pooh went into his larder to count his honey pots, and Piglet sat at the table, listening to Pooh Bear’s gentle hum.


	12. In Which Reznib Sees Things.

“Shit work, he called it. He didn’t lie about that, anyway,” Reznib muttered, as he looked up nervously at the tall trees on the outermost edge of the Wood. It was the second Strange Forest that he was to enter over the course of the same strange day. They had argued amongst themselves, Warrung and Durzlip and Noglash and Mauhúr, about whether it really was another forest or just a strange offshoot of Fangorn. That was why Durzlip and Noglash had been sent back to find the place where the Wind had stopped, when they had first discovered themselves in this strange place. To see if they could spy out Fangorn proper, and determine new bearings by which to plot a route to Isengard. Reznib, meanwhile, had been detailed to go down into the forest below, scout around some, and report back on what he found.

“And if you should bring something back in the way of food, it will go a long way toward putting you in my good graces,” Mauhúr told him.

“Am I not in your good graces now?” asked cautious Reznib. Surprisingly, Mauhúr chuckled at this, and Reznib had given him an uncertain grin. He had a notion now that Mauhúr found him funny, and Reznib didn’t reckon this should hurt his chances any. At the same time, he had no illusion that past amusement would protect him if he did something to earn Mauhúr’s displeasure. Like, say, using his little mission to go “missing.”

Unlike Shagrub, Reznib had made no ill-advised attempt to do this as yet, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been thinking about it and compiling little lists in his head about why NOT to do it.

_Consideration the First:_ Shagrub had tried to run, and look at what happened to Shagrub!

_Consideration the Second:_ They did not know where they were.

_Consideration the Third:_ That queer burning donkey might still be out there.

_Consideration the Fourth:_ The Uruk-hai were all bastards, but it wouldn’t be very sporting of him to just blow off Shagrub and Jashit by grabbing a chance to scarper without letting them in on it as well.

_Consideration the Fifth:_ Not that he wouldn’t take an opportunity to scarper if he saw a really good one, and sucks to Shagrub and Jashit – they knew it was every Orc for himself, same as he did. But just now he also knew that it was better to keep close by the others, the Uruk-hai as well as his fellow goblin-Orcs, because there was better protection in numbers.

_Consideration the Sixth:_ So if there was such strength in numbers, why was he all by himself in the woods?

_Consideration the Seventh:_ …

_Consideration the Eighth:_ …

He was well into the forest at this point, and it was harder to focus on his list of considerations when he was trying to keep his guard up and all. At least there was this to be said for the trees around him: they didn’t give him nearly the creepy crawly feel of those in Fangorn. Of course he was nervous, but he knew enough to realize that any fear he felt was coming from inside of him, not from something ominous in the vicinity. And it was hard to be _really_ frightened when there were so many flowers.

There was little plant life in the caves of Moria. Mosses, ferns and liverworts grew in hidden entryways that the inhabiting goblins fiercely protected as their dearest kept secrets. Roots hung down in some places from the gnarled trees that grew in areas aboveground. Flowers grew aboveground in those areas as well, but Reznib had never had much cause to see them. Mucking about in sun and weather was not his bag.

It seemed that here he could not put a foot down without stepping in them: bluebells, wood anemones, barberry, magnolia, forget-me-nots, wood sorrel, violets…the ground underfoot was an explosion of color and scent, as were the taller plants that grew around him. Reznib (who did not himself know the names of all these flowers, and who had never had much cause to think about them) could only gape at their profusion. He stared around him with wide eyes as he pushed through the wild plants, feeling small and lost in a sea of blossoms.

Reznib was not a skilled tracker, nor was he an expert on how to cover his own tracks. It did not occur to him that he was breaking a clear trail through the Wood, leaving an obvious wake of broken stems and bruised petals behind him…and if he had looked back, he would only have thought that this would make retracing his steps all the easier. But he was happy when he finally, pushing his way through a particularly fragrant patch of plant-life, found something that looked more like a path. Easier going this way, for more than one reason. His nostrils itched like mad, and they were starting to run.

Wiping his nose in an unbroken motion down the length of his arm, Reznib sniffed a few times before going on.

Soon thereafter he stopped again, thinking that he heard voices up ahead of him. Taking care to walk softly, he moved down the path until he had reached a little bend, where he stepped off into the undergrowth and moved through the denser shrubbery, very carefully so as not to rustle the plants too much, in a bid at disguising his approach.

What he saw made him lick his lips in a combination of interest and nerves. There was a group of rabbits up ahead – quite large rabbits, like the one Mauhúr had interrogated earlier – and they were all gathered in a close knot, sitting or standing up on their hind legs and talking and gesticulating with a good deal of rabbity energy.

Reznib thought it was strange how all the animals in this place talked, but he did not dwell on it overmuch. Certainly there were Precedents that he could think of – Wargs, Eagles, Crebain – and really, it was no stranger than walking, stomping trees, and a lot less scary. These rabbits, although they were fine big animals, were still smaller than Reznib was, and they looked like easy pickings to his way of thinking, if he could only find some way of sneaking up on one. Throttle one of those and bring it back, Mauhúr would be very pleased with him indeed.

Reznib had no reservations about eating a talking rabbit. It wouldn’t be the first time he had eaten something that could talk.

But…what if they were like that donkey? The rabbit and the donkey had looked like safe targets, but Noglash had discovered otherwise, hadn’t he? Reznib decided that he would not kill any rabbits today, not unless it was purely self-defense. Not without another Orc or Orcs to back him.

Just then two smaller rabbits dashed up on all fours, one of them holding a stick between its teeth. The rabbits that were already there moved to include the two newcomers amid their number, and the rabbit with the stick stood up and took it out of its mouth, holding it out to one of the taller rabbits, who quickly took it and unfurled it, revealing the stick to be, in actuality, some sort of a scroll. As the other rabbits gathered around to view the scroll as well, the excitement level among them jumped accordingly.

There was a little break in the woods overhead, through which the sun was shining, and it picked out the scroll in such a way that Reznib, who was facing the back of it, still fancied that he could see the outline of whatever was on the front. Fascinated, he craned forward, but he must have made some faint sound as he did so, for one of the rabbits stamped its foot suddenly and all heads and ears went up at once.

For a moment the animals were all as still as a painting: a solemn little assembly of whiskered faces and bright black eyes. Then the rabbit currently holding the scroll quickly rolled it up again and placed it between its teeth, and the whole husk of them dropped down on all fours, dashing off in the same swift instant.

Reznib, disappointed, gave it a minute to see if anyone else was coming before he pulled himself out of the low gorse and got back onto the path.

The incident with the rabbits was not a one-off. Three times over the course of the next few hours, Reznib was to spy on little groups of animals chattering amongst each other, with or without scrolls: a scurry of squirrels, a prickle of hedgehogs, and one mixed group of animals as well. This intermingled gathering actually included a stoat and several mice (!), none of which were observing the usual conventions of predator and prey. The stoat wasn’t trying to kill the mice, and the mice did not seem at all bothered about their proximity to the stoat, and would even look over and speak to it from time to time.

Reznib found this _much_ stranger than the Talking business, to the point of being downright distasteful. What kind of unnatural place bred such a queer lack of aggression? 

He was also frustrated by the fact that he could never get a good look at these scrolls they kept looking at, and he was starting to think that he should try accosting one of the animals after all, and risk the obscure possibility of a Squirrel or Hedgehog Balrog, when he heard a tapping sound coming through the trees up ahead.

This time, when he peeked through the plants, he saw a badger up on its hind legs with an open scroll plastered against the tree in front of it, which it was securing painstakingly with a hammer and nails. (And now Reznib was Absolutely, Positively, Undoubtedly Sure that this strange wood was not Fangorn; he would swear as much to Mauhúr when he finally rejoined the others, because he Highly Doubted that the trees of Fangorn would have suffered this.) This was the best that Reznib had actually been able to see one of the scrolls yet, but he still couldn’t do better than pick out the outline of a figure.

The badger, still on its hind legs, tottered back a step or two, evidently appraising its handiwork, before dropping down heavily and padding off through the trees.

Reznib, seeing his opportunity and seizing it regardless of whether the badger heard him or not, scurried forward and stood in front of the scroll, which he saw now was a Notice, and no need to read it because it was obvious enough what this particular Notice was about. Reznib’s eyes went wide. Looking around him quickly, he tore down the picture of Mauhúr and rolled it up again. Thrusting it down the back of his trousers, he turned and hurried back the way he had come.


	13. In Which Shagrub and Jashit Wake Up, and Grishnákh Shares the Watch.

Shagrub’s first thought was that he felt a good deal better, although better than what, he could not fully remember just yet. There was something warm pressed against his left side, and turning a little, he found that another goblin – _Jashit_ , his brain supplied helpfully as it continued to wake up – had snuggled up against him in his sleep. Shagrub, who was not bothered by this but did want his arm back, pulled out from under Jashit’s lumpish self and slid down off the other side of the bed.

As he stood up he stretched, a trifle gingerly yet because of the bruises that Noglash had given him. The memory of that name plus his immediate surroundings opened up the floodgates, and he quickly remembered all that had happened to this point. Amazed to think of all that had happened, he stretched again and wondered how he and Jashit had managed to get away with their furtive nap for so long. It must have been a good few hours at least for him to feel this much improved, but certainly not more than a day, or someone would have wakened them by now. Unless…

_Shit! They ditched us!_ he thought, and he turned and hopped onto the bed. “Hi, Jashit. Jashit,” he whispered urgently, grabbing hold of the other goblin and rocking him from side to side to wake him up.

“What are you… _who_ … Where’s Gobsnud?!” Jashit demanded, siting up in alarm.

“Gobsnud’s not here.” Quickly, before Jashit could think of falling apart over this: “Listen! and get ready to hump yourself, Jashit – I think that we might have – ”

“Well well well! Sounds like our two little birds have woken up,” someone remarked outside.

“They should come along, then, shouldn’t they? It’s about time they joined the rest of us.”

Shagrub and Jashit both looked at each other. That first voice definitely belonged to Noglash, and the second voice was that of Mauhúr.

Reznib appeared in the entrance just then, looking for and finding them immediately in the gloom. “Hi! Come on,” he gestured, and disappeared again just as quickly.

Jashit was the first to move as, shrugging, he hopped down off the bed and went to the door of the tree. Shagrub followed, more warily.

It was twilight now, and Reznib was standing just a few feet outside the door, waiting for them. When he saw that they were up he gestured again and turned toward the group of Uruk-hai, who were standing together and looking at something that Mauhúr held open before him. Although they had called to Shagrub and Jashit, neither Mauhúr nor Noglash were paying any attention to them, clearly focused on whatever it was they were looking at.

“What’s going on?” Shagrub asked Reznib, who quickly told them all that had happened while they were sleeping, most notably his dispatch by Mauhúr to scout out the nearby Wood, and the Notice he’d brought back.

Jashit brightened visibly as Reznib related Mauhúr’s instruction to look for food, but wilted when the other goblin admitted that he hadn’t found any. Reznib did say that he’d seen some more of those strange talking animals out in the Wood but, mindful of what had happened earlier, had decided not to attack them.

“Guess I wouldn’t have done any different if it’d been me,” admitted Jashit, “but I _am_ awfully hungry.”

“So am I,” said Shagrub.

“If you want food then you can work for it,” said Noglash without looking up from the scroll that he and the other Uruk-hai were studying.

“It’s really not that bad a likeness,” Durzlip was saying.

Mauhúr glanced at him sidelong. “You don’t think the nose is off, eh.”

“Well…” Durzlip shrugged tactfully.

“Captured your general demeanor anyway, whoever did it,” said Warrung, looking down at the scroll with a critical eye. “Just see that stance! Mucked up the armor, of course, but you have to imagine, whoever it was, he was doing it from memory.”

“You say that the animals you saw were carrying drawings like this all through the Wood?” Mauhúr asked Reznib. He looked up from the scroll, glancing at the goblin-Orc.

“Yeah, that’s what I said. I mean, I never did get a good look at the others, did I? ’cause when I saw them no one was exactly holding still long enough for me to look. Still an’ all, I have to figure they were all the same sort of thing.”

“It’s obviously meant to be a Warning,” said Noglash. “At least the stupid little beasts are smart enough to know they should fear us,” he added, grimly satisfied.

“That’s as may be,” said Mauhúr, “but a little caution on our part would not serve us ill either. We’re not going to underestimate the animals in this place again. We know about Them and it is very obvious that They, all of them, have spread the word about Us. Let’s leave it at that for tonight.”

“So what now?” asked Durzlip. “Noglash and I already told you what we saw up on the ridge. It’s just as it was when we found ourselves there in the first place.

Warrung nodded. “Not the right terrain at all, in any direction. I saw many high ridges and downs off to the north. It’s green, but it isn’t Rohan, and the land looks windswept and empty.”

“Where on earth would we be other than Rohan?” said Noglash, scowling, though his scowl was not directed at Warrung or at any one member of their company as such. Noglash’s scowl reflected the same uncertainty and frustration that all of them felt.

“Let’s speak more on this in the morning,” said Mauhúr. “I think we should all share out what remains of our rations, and then get some rest. Excepting these two, of course – ” his gaze flicking over Shagrub and Jashit. “You two have already been able to sleep some. You can take the watch.”

Although Durzlip had been in charge of rations up till now, it was Mauhúr who divided them out this time. Durzlip wasn’t resentful but he couldn’t help expressing a concern he felt, though he waited respectfully first for Mauhúr to finish handing out the meager scraps of food. “Eh, Captain,” he muttered to their leader, fingering the bread that Mauhúr had given him with dirty claws. “You know, right, that this is all we have?”

“Yes,” said Mauhúr. “And I might have continued to portion it out until we were down to a crumb apiece. Instead, tomorrow, we will have nothing except what we are able to find for ourselves. I do think Reznib had the right of it, not tackling any of those animals on his own, but it’s obvious that he saw many good opportunities. We don’t want any more…'incidents,' of course. But I think there should good hunting to be had here if we go carefully. Not all of the animals can be like that one earlier, surely!”

“Hear the snaga going on about it, they think he’s that Balrog of theirs, or something like it at any rate,” chuckled Durzlip. He was smirking as he said it, but the expression wavered a little as he hesitated: “You…you don’t think they’re right, do you, Captain?”

“I’ve never seen a Balrog,” said Mauhúr, frowning, “and I know precious little about them beyond what these little mountain rats were telling us today. Still, they sound much – larger, and much grander than the creature that we saw. That donkey was smaller, I think, and rather shabby to boot.”

“It didn’t feel small at the time,” said Durzlip.

-.-.-.-

There was no fire, so Shagrub and Jashit huddled close together. It was a cool night but not a cold one, and most Orcs, with their hot blood and thick skins, would have found it downright pleasant, but huddling together also provided some measure of comfort for the two small goblin-Orcs. Jashit was feeling badly about Gobsnud, and about Urgat before him. Shagrub, who was not nearly so sentimental, nonetheless found Jashit's close heat a soothing reminder that he was not alone as he kept watch.

Two of the Uruk-hai, Noglash and Durzlip, were sleeping in the grass behind them, just outside of the tree. Feeling that the snaga Orcs had shown it plenty safe within, and not especially bothered by close spaces if it was just to sleep, Mauhúr and Warrung had opted to go inside to spend the night, as had Reznib. Shagrub thought jealously of Reznib and his comfy quarters: those lanky Uruk-hai were much too long for the small bed inside, so Reznib had it all to himself.

That only left one of their little group unaccounted for: the mysterious and malignant Grishnákh, who had wandered off earlier and not come back. Shagrub, hesitating, eventually got up to go wake Mauhúr and tell him about it. Mauhúr, who had been lying on the floor beside the little bed, lifted his head and gave Shagrub a level stare. “Don’t wake me again,” he said, “unless it is something that really strikes both you and Jashit as dangerous. I don’t intend to go tracking the likes of Grishnákh right now, in the middle of the night. If he isn’t back by morning then that’s one thing, but I expect he’ll return before then.”

“Yes sir. Sorry sir,” muttered Shagrub, and started to turn away. _What_ , he wondered resentfully, _is the point of setting two on night-watch if you aren’t prepared to hear what they’ve got to report?_

“That isn’t all of it, Shagrub,” said Mauhúr after him. Shagrub turned back toward Mauhúr a bit nervously, surprised at the use of his name and wondering if Mauhúr had somehow read his thoughts. “I don’t mind you coming to wake me up and tell me, this one time. Don’t wake me when he comes back, but keep count of each of his comings and goings, and tell me about them in the morning.”

“So what’d Mauhúr say?” asked Jashit when Shagrub rejoined him a minute later.

“Told me not to wake him again, but count the times that Grishnákh comes and goes and then tell him in the morning.”

Jashit shuddered a little. “Grishnákh… I won’t lie to you, Shagrub, I’m a bit afraid of him. The Uruk-hai are bad, all right, but them Mordor Orcs…” He shuddered again and said no more on the matter, and Shagrub didn’t either, but he knew what Jashit was talking about. Orcs from Down East gave him the creeps as well.

That didn’t mean Shagrub wasn’t going to keep close tabs on Grishnákh. He’d already told himself that he was going to, after all. But he planned on keeping very careful how he went about it – and like Mauhúr, he certainly had no desire to go off and track the other Orc just now. He wasn’t prepared to do a thing like that until he had a better sense of this place that they were dealing with, and what _else_ might be lurking out there besides a creepy Orc from Lugbúrz.

Some hours had passed since Shagrub had awakened Mauhúr and was given his instructions. By that time he and Jashit were taking turns jostling each other as one would let his head drop for a little while and nap until such a time as his companion elbowed him again, whereupon he would lift his head and looked out over the valleys until it came time to return the favor. It was Shagrub who was watching at the moment, and against all logic he nearly cried out when he saw the dark thing moving up the slope toward them.

It Did Not Have A Head.

Then the image resolved itself properly in his eyes and Shagrub realized what he was looking at: Grishnákh, of course, coming back like Mauhúr had said that he would, his large head down at just the right angle to be lost against the broader silhouette of his apelike body. Realizing this, Shagrub relaxed, but when Grishnákh lifted his head Shagrub leaned forward abruptly, startling Jashit out of his little doze.

“What is it, Shagrub?” he whispered.

“It’s nothing, Jashit,” Shagrub reassured him. “Only Grishnákh coming back.”

“ _Only_ Grishnákh, did I hear? _Nothing_ but Grishnákh? That’s hardly polite, is it, my little ones.” Grishnákh had heard them, of course, and was now directing his crooked-legged steps toward them.

Shagrub felt Jashit quiver slightly beside him, but Shagrub only watched – nervous, yes, but eager – as the Orc drew closer. He had thought he saw something glowing around Grishnákh’s neck. All that Grishnákh wore there was the Eye, and just now it looked dull as ditchwater, but Shagrub decided to himself that this must have been it.

_So it_ is _some kind of magic_ , he thought.

The Mordor Orc paused some feet in front of them, and Shagrub realized belatedly that Grishnákh was looking directly at him. “Not polite to stare either,” said Grishnákh softly as one hand crept up to curl over the little talisman.

“Oh,” said Shagrub in the easiest voice that he could manage. “We didn’t know who you were at first, that’s all. No offense to yourself intended, of course.”

“Is that so,” breathed Grishnákh. “Well, I have been maintaining a kind of watch of my own. Let me join you both and we can keep each other company.”

Jashit’s quivering had progressed to a hard shudder, and Shagrub elbowed him fiercely. “By all means,” he said.

He was a little alarmed, though, at where Grishnákh decided to sit: directly beside him, with a long arm that easily spanned both his back and that of Jashit, who was to Shagrub’s left. The Mordor Orc’s touch made Shagrub’s skin crawl, and his mind turned unwillingly to the dark thoughts he had originally pondered when he saw Grishnákh pawing over the Halflings. Jashit, beyond either quivering or shuddering now, was quite still, his fear of Grishnákh having driven him to absolute rigidity.

“Isn’t this nice,” whispered Grishnákh.

“ _So you –_ ” Shagrub squeaked, and broke off. He coughed and tried again. “So. You were taking a walk, were you?” he asked, all innocence.

“An evening constitutional,” said Grishnákh. “Just to get the blood warm. Very important, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” said Shagrub, nodding. “Very important. Not good to have cold blood.”

“That’s a long time to go for a walk,” said Jashit numbly. As frightened as the other Orc was, Shagrub was impressed with him for saying that much at all.

“Did you go very far?” Shagrub asked in turn.

“I went all around the Wood,” said Grishnákh. “I have passed it by on all sides now: North, West, South and East. You will tell Mauhúr, won’t you, my little one? I’m sure that he’ll be eager to hear of it…” He murmured this last into Shagrub’s ear.

“Mauhúr’s told me not to wake him,” Shagrub managed, since it was only true.

“Not even for _‘It’s nothing’_ me?” Grishnákh gave the two goblin-Orcs the mockery of a friendly squeeze. Neither of them said anything this time, and Grishnákh laughed. “And aren’t you going to ask me all I’ve seen? Or if I met anybody along the way?”

“You didn’t bring food,” said Shagrub, “and I don’t smell blood.”

“Who’s to say there must be blood if I meet someone?” asked Grishnákh playfully.

“Er,” said Shagrub, exceedingly unnerved. “Um. Did you…?”

“Let’s just stop there, why don’t we?” The Mordor Orc’s breath was hot on Shagrub’s cheek. “I shall, of course, be making a _full_ report of my activities to Mauhúr in the morning.” He gave them both another squeeze, then got to his feet and stood looking down at them for a moment. “You are a curious one, my dear Shagrub, but really. You cannot expect me to divulge all my secrets _that_ easily.”

And with this Grishnákh left them, going to pick his way past Noglash and Durzlip as he disappeared into the tree. Shagrub was staring after, wondering if Grishnákh was actually waking Mauhúr up right this minute, and if there was chance that he, Shagrub, would be able to eavesdrop on them, when he was distracted by Jashit hitting him very hard. “Ow!” exclaimed Shagrub, rubbing his shoulder where he’d been struck, and immediately hit Jashit back. “What was that for?” he demanded.

“You unutterable _prick_!” Jashit rubbed himself and glared at him. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!”

“What, hit you? You hit me first!”

“ _No_! Involve me in this…whatever this thing is between you and Grishnákh! I thought my heart was going to stop! That or he was going to slit both our throats!”

“There is nothing going on between me and Grishnákh – ”

“There might not have been before, but after the way you were staring at him just now? You’ve Drawn His Attention, Shagrub! Why would you do that? I mean really! How stupid can you be?”

“I wasn’t trying to,” said Shagrub uneasily, realizing that Jashit was right. “I was just looking at his Eye.”

“Oh yes? _Well!_ You have both his eyes on you now, and no mistake!”

-.-.-.-

Inside the tree, Grishnákh ignored the two Uruk-hai on the floor and the little snaga sleeping on its filthy bed. He looked around him at the inside of the tree, and then put his hand out and touched the long kite on the wall.

Grishnákh, unlike the goblin-Orcs, knew what a kite was. Grishnákh came from Mordor and had known Easterlings and Haradrim in the service of the Eye. He had heard of contraptions such as this: airborne affairs of wood and fabric with saw-like strings, meant to batter and tear their opponents like the hook-billed birds of prey for which they were named. He had even seen such fighter kites in action – briefly, admittedly, and from afar, circling and and diving over a whooping battle camp. Soldiers are as playful as children when they are bored.

When he ran the string of this kite through his fingertips it was not sharp or saw-like at all, passing between them with a smooth whisper of sound. Certainly it did not look like the fierce fighter kites that he had heard of and which he had seen.

When he turned, Mauhúr had lifted his head and was looking at him. Grishnákh, who had known that the Uruk was awake as soon as he entered the tree, only smiled at him and held up his hands, palms outward. He leaned back against the wall in a manner that invited questions, if Mauhúr only cared to ask them. But Mauhúr just gazed at him implacably before lowering his head again, and Grishnákh knew that all questions would keep till morning.

Getting down on the floor with his back against the wall, he sat there until he knew that he was the only one left awake. Slowly, he allowed his head to sink forward as, behind closed lids, he watched the Great Eye burning in the dark.


	14. In Which Pooh and Piglet Post Some Missages, and Something Else Happens.

Piglet woke from dreams in which a ferocious F.B.A. chased him in circles round a giant honey pot. He was gasping for breath, his tiny heart racing inside his chest, and Pooh was sitting high above him on the rim of the honey pot, dangling his legs over the side and licking the honey from his paws as he watched the chase below, and telling Piglet encouragingly that Things Always Get Worse before they can get any Better.

Piglet woke in a panic to find himself near smothered by his sheets, which had got tangled around him as he tossed in his fitful sleep. “Dear me,” he whispered to himself and sank back against his pillow. As he lay there he remembered something of his dream, and he felt a responsive annoyance at Dream-Pooh for being No Help Whatsoever.

Then he heard a snore and sat up to see that the real Pooh was not in his bed, but was sleeping in a chair that he had leaned back against the door at some point in the night.

Piglet, seeing Pooh shift a little as if he was cold, got out of bed and went over to pick up the blanket that had puddled on the floor beside Pooh’s chair. He tossed it up over Pooh, who roused slightly. “Is it breakfast time?” Bear asked him sleepily.

“It’s half-four,” said Piglet, who had glanced at the little watch-and-chain that Christopher Robin had once given him and which he liked to keep beneath his pillow. Of course, it was always half-four on that watch, but Piglet suspected that this time it was not far off.

“Oh,” said Pooh. “Wake me when it’s breakfast-time…”

“Come on, Pooh,” said Piglet, patting one of his paws, “let’s get you back to bed.”

“But I have to guard Piglet,” yawned Pooh.

Touched by this statement and somewhat ashamed of his earlier thought, Piglet caught his friend by the paw and tugged with greater insistence. “It’s my turn to guard you, Pooh Bear. Come along.”

Once on his feet Pooh was agreeable enough to being coaxed back into his usual bed. When he was in it and under the covers again he fell immediately into a sound sleep. Piglet, knowing that Pooh wouldn’t hear him, nonetheless moved on tiptoe as he went to the door and opened it. He found a morning that was just preparing to call itself morning: the light was gray on the dew-sparkled grass, and the first birds were starting to sing. So, later than half-four, but not by all that much. The world looked much as it always had, but Piglet knew that Things Had Changed.

“I wonder what’s going to happen exciting _today_ ,” Piglet said to himself, but he felt a kind of dread as he said it.

-.-.-.-

Well, the first thing they were to do, Rabbit had instructed them, was put up their Circulars. Seven had gone out the day before, of course, with those friends-and-relations of Rabbit who had shown up at the Meeting, and two more had gone out with Kanga and Roo and Tigger, and of course there were some still with Eeyore and Rabbit and Owl, but Pooh and Piglet had carried home the bulk of them.

Rabbit said that he was sure the word would get out quickly once his friends-and-relations went home and told their families and their families told all of their neighbors, which left Piglet wondering: What was the point of posting more Circulars if the information was already so thoroughly disseminated?

“But it makes sense to me,” said Pooh, “because it is one thing to Know about the F.B.A., but a Picture is a very good reminder.”

Certainly it was if it was Pooh’s Picture, Piglet thought with a shudder as he tacked up another image of the grim-faced leader of the F.B.A. Even though this Mauhúr was mere pen and ink on the page, the Orc gazed down at Piglet with eyes that were far too penetrating for comfort. It made Piglet wonder at his friend just a little, that Pooh, who was so kindly and good-natured, could produce such a convicting image of someone so much the opposite.

“Only think of all those flowers that we picked yesterday,” Pooh was saying from between Piglet’s legs. “Whatever did we do with them? Do you remember?” He was standing with his lower half in a sea of bluebells, holding Piglet up on his shoulders so that Piglet could tack their Circular higher, on the grounds that it should attract more attention. That was Piglet’s argument, anyway. Pooh, being the one who had to lift Piglet, was somewhat more doubtful about the endeavor and the reasoning that Piglet gave for it. After all, Pooh was probably as tall as anyone else in the Wood (with the exception of Owl, known for his imposing stature, and of Rabbit, when he was up on his hind legs with ears at full attention), and Pooh did not see the need for so many extra inches.

“Perhaps we left them up by the place with the big stones and rocks,” said Piglet. “No,” he answered himself, “I think we still had them when we went to Rabbit’s. …Pooh,” he said hesitantly, voicing something that he had thought before but not dared to ask, “do you think…do you think it’s our fault, the Thing that Happened? To Rabbit’s door, and to Eeyore?”

Pooh didn’t say anything, only kept holding Piglet up until Piglet had tapped in the fourth nail. “Yes and no, I suppose,” he said, when he had helped Piglet down. “After all, we led the F.B.A. right to Rabbit’s house, because – well, because they were asking for help, you know, and directions, and so we helped them.”

“Yes,” said Piglet unhappily. He had not said anything till now, but he had been thinking about this, wondering if they had done wrong the day before and thinking how things might have turned out different if he and Pooh had done otherwise, and now Pooh was telling him that he was Right.

“But we couldn’t have known what they would do there,” said Pooh, “and also, when you think about it, it’s likely they would have come to Rabbit’s anyway.”

“You mean you think it’s possible?” said Piglet.

“I mean I think it’s _probable_. This is only what I think,” said Pooh humbly, “and of course I am not a bear much known for my Brain,” he went on, “but they were already following the stream, you know, and the stream leads right past Rabbit’s house.”

“But Pooh, of course,” Piglet breathed. “ _Of course_ , that’s true!” His eyes went wide and round as he thought of the implications. Only now did he realize just how guilty he had been feeling: the moment when he felt the guilt starting to leave.

“But even if it wasn’t,” Pooh said reflectively, “they were so very lost, after all. I don’t think we were bad for trying to help them, just as we would have wanted someone to help us.”

“I wonder what Eeyore would think about that,” muttered Piglet. “Lift me up again?” he asked Pooh as they reached the Six Pine Trees, and he picked out the likeliest of the six.

Pooh sighed and got down again to boost Piglet up.

When they had got into the Wood proper, Pooh pointed out very respectfully that they would put up their Circulars more quickly if Piglet took some and he took the others and both were tacking them up at the same time.

“You mean split up?” asked Piglet nervously.

“I don’t think it’s splitting up if we’re still in sight of one another, or at least in whistling distance,” said Pooh. In fact, he went on, the latter would be the better of the two, because if they put all of their Circulars up within sight of one another, Rabbit would probably call that Redundant.

“But you can’t whistle,” Piglet reminded him. “You made up a whole Hum about it.”

This was true, at least in part. The Hum was called “Cottleston Pie,” but only the second verse was about whistling.

“That’s true,” Pooh said. He thought about this. “I know what I will do,” he said. “I won’t whistle, but I will Hum. I will hum a Missage Song about Putting Up Missages, and then you just keep within reach of the Hum.”

“Why not a Circular Song about Putting Up Circulars?”

Pooh shrugged. These Circulars was meant as a sort of Missage, after all, and Missage was much the shorter of the two. Besides, it was a prettier word. (Piglet, for his part, thought that Circular was the prettier of the two, but decided not to argue about this. Besides, he thought to himself, the Missage they were spreading was not an especially pretty one anyway.)

“What do you think?  
We’re putting up  
A Missage of Sorts  
A Kind of Note  
To tell you a thing  
We think you should know  
A Sort of a Kind of an Anecdote.  
The Thing That Happened  
It happened (we saw)  
When winter was over  
And after the thaw  
In spring in fact  
When the sun was out  
And winter was over, there is no doubt.  
This Thing That Happened  
(It Hap’d, I recall)  
It wasn’t a nice sort of thing at all  
But the birds still sing  
In the cool sweet air  
So I shall make garlands  
For my hair – ”

“Pooh!” Piglet called to him. “You don’t have hair!”

There was silence. Pooh was out of sight at this point, and Piglet was just beginning to worry when Pooh called back: “I have _fur_ … That’s a kind of hair, isn’t it?

“But you lost track of the Missage, though,” said Piglet.

“…So I did! Hold on then, Piglet, I shall get it back in a minute.”

Piglet shook his head because he knew that Pooh couldn’t see him and started to put up another Circular.

Pooh, meanwhile, began to hum again. It really was a hum at first, in his nose and in the back of his throat, because he was trying to find his rhythm again and the place where he’d left off.

“I mean I’ll make garlands for my fur,  
And we’ll laugh again  
In the flowering wood  
And we’ll tell all the people that we know  
And we’ll tack up our Missages as we go  
So that everyone that we meet will know  
Of the thing that happened a day ago  
With the F.B.A.  
And the things they did…

“ _Bother_.”

This last was not meant to be part of Pooh’s Hum, of course. He realized that he had gone right off of the rhythm he’d had before Piglet interrupted him, and no matter how hard he tried to go back to it, it was lost.

To make matters worse, he had also managed to drop the second nail that he was using to tack up his Circular.

“Double bother,” said Pooh as he lowered his hammer and tried to see where the nail had got to, but knew at once there would be no finding it again on the flower-grown forest floor. He looked in his hand and realized that he only had one nail left anyway, and the Missage was going to need another two. “Piglet, have you got any more nails? And do you have a good rhyme for ‘Did’?”

He waited a moment. “Piglet?”

No answer, so he stumped away to go find Piglet.

But Piglet had disappeared.


	15. In Which a Very Small Animal Finds His Voice, and Piglet and Pooh Both Make a Decision.

“No joy here,” announced Shagrub as he and Reznib emerged from the burrow. “That was a good idea, Jashit, but they must have taken it all.”

“Just as well, I guess.” Jashit, who had been posted as the lookout of the three, tried to contain his disappointment. “It would probably only’ve been carrots and cabbages and – and – and _turnips_ and stuff like that, anyhow.”

Mauhúr had sent them out to look for food: as for Mauhúr, he and Warrung had gone with Grishnákh to circumnavigate the Forest, retracing the Mordor Orc’s constitutional of the night before, while Durzlip and Noglash guarded their base camp back at the enormous tree.

The first place the goblins had gone was back to the rabbit burrow. They were nervous when they did it, because they were wary of encountering the donkey again and its little coterie, but the place seemed to be abandoned, and the hole in the bank remained open and unguarded. The mess that they had left behind yesterday was partially pushed aside, presumably by the hole’s absent tenant, but all scent of the rabbit itself was a day old. Rabbit was gone, and when he left, it seemed that he had taken any food stores with him.

Reznib groaned. “Listen, friend, I am hungry enough that I could go for a carrot just now. Even that filthy bread they were feeding us when we were running among the Uruk-hai – even that would not go amiss as far as I’m concerned.”

“That Mauhúr – he’s too clever by half,” said Shagrub. “You know that’s why he let us eat up all of our rations last night. We’ll _have_ to bring something with us when we go back, and never mind a beating. If we return empty-handed we won’t have nothing to eat at all.”

There followed much complaining and some grudging noises of respect for their tricksy Uruk boss. Only think of it: he was almost as sneaky as a goblin!

“Well, nothing for it, I suppose,” said Shagrub at last. “We’ve avoided it till now, but I guess it’s time we go into the Wood itself.”

“Excuse me,” said Reznib, narrowing his eyes at Shagrub, “I _was_ in the Wood yesterday, and by myself too, while you and Jashit were having your little nap.” Not that it had turned out badly for him, but he was a little irritated that Shagrub had forgotten this.

Shagrub grinned. “Reckon we should let you lead us, since you already know a little something about it.”

“Now just a moment. That’s not what I was getting at all. For one thing, I entered it from a completely different angle, and – ”

“I agree with Shagrub,” Jashit said immediately.

Reznib glowered at him.

“So it’s decided,” said Shagrub cheerfully. “Now get along, Reznib! The day isn’t growing any younger, and you are holding both of us up.”

Reznib glowered at him in turn, then swung around and stalked in the direction of the Wood, while Shagrub and Jashit followed along, smirking, behind him.

Once they were in the forest itself some of their merriment was tempered by unease. Although their immediate physical comfort was improved by tree cover, the profusion of fragrant flowers filled their broad clever nostrils, mucking up their sense of smell, and their direct line of sight was much reduced on all sides. Jashit, who with Shagrub, had forced Reznib to take the lead, ended up taking it after all because of his experience as a longtime forest dweller, with Shagrub immediately behind him and Reznib, a good deal happier, at the rear.

As they walked, Jashit imparted some of his superior woodsmanship to them, displaying a confidence that would only have got him stomped if the Uruk-hai had been with them:

“…so you see, it’s really not bad living in the Mirkwood at all, or at least not so bad as folk imagine. It’s easy enough to watch out for the spiders: only a fool would miss avoiding the kind of webs they spin, as big as they are, but of course that only makes ’em all the more irritable, because they are so hungry, you know. When I was a little goblin I remember, if we had someone we didn’t like, we’d toss ’em into a spider web and run away quick, and they’d have to cut their way out on their own, or be prepared to bargain with the spiders to turn loose of ’em.” Shagrub and Reznib laughed with cruel humor at this last part, but it turned out that Jashit was quite serious: “Oh yeah, they’ll bargain with you, will the big spiders, if you only go about it the right way. You have to know what they like, you see.”

Shagrub and Reznib exchanged a glance at this, one of mingled surprise and curiosity. “What do the big spiders like, then?” asked Reznib.

“Apart from blood, of course,” said Shagrub.

“Shiny things,” said Jashit easily. “Whether it’s a gem stone or it’s just a bit of foil – the shinier the better. They’re worse than magpies, you know. I’d even say they’re as bad as dragons. Yeah, regular dragons of the forest they are!” Reining in the comparison somewhat: “Only dragons don’t have quite so many legs.”

Just then they heard up a voice up in front of them, a familiar voice that made them look at each other sharply and hold their tongues as they drew close to one another and schooled their steps to a stealthier tread.

“What do you think?  
We’re putting up  
A Missage of Sorts  
A Kind of Note  
To tell you a thing  
We think you should know  
A Sort of a Kind of an Anecdote…”

Jashit, jerking his head once in reply to a wordless glance from Shagrub, scurried ahead.

Even as the poem came to its (interrupted) pause, he was already hurrying back. “It’s that bear,” he whispered.

“Course it’s the bear, we already knew that,” hissed Shagrub.

“It’s the pig too, though. Hear him squeaking up ahead?” They could hear the small voice from where they were standing, only just audible because it was speaking at an elevated level. “He’s a little distance from the bear – they’re just out of sight from one another.”

“The bear is bigger than the pig,” said Shagrub.

“Not as big as us, though. We could take ’em both easy.”

“We’d have to manage both of ’em, though,” said Reznib. “They might make good prisoners, but as I remember it, they didn’t smell like good eating. Not like the rabbit did.”

“He’s right,” said Jashit, looking at Shagrub. “We wouldn’t get much of a meal out of them.”

“Let’s take one of them anyway, for Questioning,” suggested Shagrub. “The pig’s closer, and he should be an easy catch. Just a quick snatch an’ grab.”

“Right then!”

“Right…”

Jashit moved first in a broad arc, out and to the left, with Reznib and Shagrub following, as they plotted the course for an impromptu ambush.

-.-.-.-

Piglet didn’t have time to make so much as a squeak. One minute he was tapping happily on a nail, listening to Pooh Bear’s rhythmic voice, and the next minute he was caught in a powerful grip, a tight arm across his body and a hot, rough hand across his face. As the Thing bounded away with him, Piglet realized exactly what had happened.

_Oh Dear. Oh Dear D-D-Dearie Dear!_

He Had Been Captured By The F.B.A.!

Struggle as he might, it was to no avail: Piglet was a Very Small Animal and the F.B.A. that had caught him was much bigger than he was. As they rushed along, Piglet tried to think of what he should do, but all he could remember was the last time something like this had happened, when he had snuck into Kanga’s pocket. He had not liked it at the time, but nonetheless that had been positively pleasant compared to this. Kanga’s pocket was warm and soft, but the grip of the F.B.A. was hot and jarring, and the hand across his face made it impossible to breathe. Fortunately the hand moved long enough for him to suck in a quick gasp, but then it only clapped over his face again, and he heard a voice above him growl:

“Don’t Say Nothin’.”

_But that’s all I CAN say!_ thought Piglet, terrified. And he went on saying Nothing, until at last the sickening motion stopped, and he could feel his captor double over him, panting.

“All right, Reznib, I think we’re far enough away. You can uncover his mouth now.”

That was when Piglet realized which of the F.B.A. had caught him.

Reznib uncovered his face and Piglet took another gasp, and then another, and then another, shuddering all the while he did so. He looked around himself quickly and found that he was on the ground with three of the smaller F.B.A. members around him. They had dropped down on the grass and were breathing heavily as well, though not so heavily as he was, and they were recovering more quickly too, because of course they weren’t so frightened as him, and nobody had been covering _their_ mouths.

In addition to terrified, Piglet realized he was also Angry. “WHY are you DOING these things?!” he shouted at them. “WHY do you have to be so HORRIBLE?!” And noticing that Reznib was still wearing his scarf, he grew even Angrier. “ _I gave you that scarf!_ ” he cried.

Reznib, looking surprised at the outburst, fingered the garment uneasily.

“Now look, you shouty little mouse,” said Shagrub. “You’re in no position to yell at us.”

“I’M STANDING RIGHT HERE!!” shrieked Piglet.

Shagrub rolled his eyes. “I mean it isn’t _wise_ , you fool,” he said, and he pulled out his knife. Jashit and Reznib did the same, and Piglet’s mouth, which was open to shriek again, sprang shut. He subsided in fear and more than a bit of sulk. “Right,” said Shagrub. “That’s better. We don’t want to poke you, but we will if you make us.”

“Yeah,” said Jashit.

“And it’s no good you yelling because nobody can hear you, and you only sound like a sort of angry chipmunk.”

Piglet opened his mouth again indignantly at this, but seeing how Jashit was touching his knife, he sagged a little. “All right,” he said crossly. “What do you want.”

“That’s a good question,” said Shagrub. “Well, right now we’re hungry. We want you to show us where we can get food.”

Piglet stared at him. “…you’re hungry?”

All three of them nodded in response.

“Is that why you’ve done all this? Because you just want something to eat?” Much the same response followed. “But that’s Silly!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t you just _ask_ for food if you were hungry?”

Shagrub exchanged a look with his fellows, then looked at Piglet again. “Would that have worked?” he asked.

“Well it _might_ have done, mightn’t it? You certainly look like you could stand to eat something! Your arms are so trifficly skinny…”

“There’s no call for personal remarks,” said Reznib, rubbing his arm uncomfortably. “And our arms are skinny anyways,” he added. Which was true to a point – goblins are known for their wiry arms and legs – but these three goblin-Orcs were also undernourished due to many recent trials and deprivations.

Piglet was not fooled. “But just _look_ at how your clothes are hanging off of you!” he said, angry fear giving way now to something more like angry pity. He pointed at them: a rude act but more than understandable, given the circumstances. “I may not wear many clothes apart from my jumper,” he went on, “or my _scarf_ – ” (looking fiercely at Reznib) “but I know that they should fit rather better than _that_.”

“All right,” snapped Shagrub, “all right, well – It’s true. We _haven’t_ had much food of late. We’re starving, in fact. And we really, really want something to eat.” It was obviously meant to sound aggressive, but his voice quavered a little as he said it. Reznib nodded, and Jashit lowered his knife a fraction in acknowledgment.

Piglet looked at the three of them, somewhat at a loss. He was still angry, and more than that: he Knew that the three Orcs were no less dangerous than they had been a bare few moments before. But he also felt tremendously sorry for them, and he couldn’t help remembering what Pooh had only just said to him.

_“I don’t think we were bad for trying to help them, just as we would have wanted someone to help us.”_

Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath.

“I know,” said Piglet, “where you can get some food.”

-.-.-.-

Pooh stood in the place where Piglet had disappeared and where he had found Piglet's little sheaf of orphaned Circulars, feeling desolate. He had stumped about for several minutes, looking all about him and Hallo-ing as he went, but Piglet was nowhere to be seen. Now he stood amid the bluebells, and a tear slipped down his cheek. He knew that, much as he might have liked to, he could not just rush off growling into the Woods after Piglet. The Thing To Do, he knew, was to go and tell Rabbit and the others what had happened. Rabbit was clever, and he would take quick command and probably form some kind of Search Party to look for Piglet. But Pooh was afraid to do that. He felt that if he left the place where he had last seen Piglet, he might never see his friend again.

“Oh Pooh…!”

Pooh turned around, and saw three long-armed figures break from the nearby trees, and Piglet was at the front of them. As Pooh opened his arms, Piglet ran forward and hurried into them, clinging to Pooh as if he would never let go.

“Pooh Bear,” he whispered, looking up at him searchingly, his eyes begging him to understand. To Forgive. “They say they’re starving, Pooh.” His voice shook a little.

Lifting his head, Pooh looked at the three F.B.A. as they followed along behind Piglet. They looked fierce and defiant, but also desperate, anxious, and hungry. Pooh drew his paw over his damp face, and nodded simply. “Then come with us,” he told the Orcs. “We’ll give you something to eat.”


	16. In Which Conversation, Commiseration and Comestibles Are Combined.

"You'll have your food sooner," said Pooh reproachfully, "if you'll only wait for us to give it to you."

Shagrub ignored him, walking around the bear's little den and looking all about, pausing from time to time to peer under furniture or pick something up for closer inspection. He no longer tried tasting things indiscriminately, because the last time he did that he ended up with a sickening mouthful of honey, but that didn't stop him from continuing to look for something more like meat, even though Pooh and Piglet had told him, in their most polite voices, that no meat would be forthcoming.

Shagrub was restless. He wasn't about to rob or pillage anything (had there been anything WORTH robbing and pillaging), only…he had never _been_ in someone's Home without doing those things before. He wasn't entirely sure what to do with himself.

Jashit and Reznib, by comparison, were sitting at the table with Pooh, looking on in interest while Piglet put out five china bowls. Taking a tin he had opened, he carefully tipped a quantity of a slithery off-white substance into each of them. He was standing up on a chair to do it, and Pooh had put a paw on the back of it to hold it steady. "There!" Piglet chirped, and he pushed a bowl each toward Jashit and Reznib.

"Er," said Reznib, immensely disconcerted, as he stared down at his bowl.

"What IS that?" asked Jashit, morbidly fascinated.

Shagrub's head jerked toward them and he stalked over to look down, suspiciously, into the bowls. "I'm not eating that," he said flatly. "It looks Wrong."

"It's Condensed Milk," Piglet told him. "It's Very Good. Just try a little of it." He held a small spoonful out to Shagrub. Shagrub folded his arms across his chest, so Piglet offered it to Jashit instead, who did the same.

Pooh watched these maneuvers hopefully. "If they don't want it, perhaps _I_ might…?"

"Pooh," said Piglet sternly, "there is already some in your bowl." He held the spoon out to Reznib. "Try some?" he chirped, undiscouraged by other rebuffs.

Warily Reznib tooked the spooon and dipped it into his bowl. When he lifted it up again the stuff _dribbled_ off the end in a very disturbing way. He glanced at the other two goblins, who were looking at him as though he was preparing to eat a slug. Piglet was waiting expectantly, though, and Reznib, who decided that he had got this far at any rate, stuck the spoon in his mouth.

His response persuaded Shagrub and Jashit to get past their reservations. Jashit made a pleased noise around his own spoon. Shagrub still found the stuff monstrous sweet, but not so sticky as the honey, and more pleasant than its appearance had led him to suspect.

"Condensed Milk is VERY nourishing," Piglet informed them, "but it will make you sick if you have _too_ too much of it, so you'll want to have something else with it as well. What do we have, Pooh?"

"Raspberries," said Pooh. "And more of that cake from Kanga."

After the Discovery of Condensed Milk the goblins became a good deal more willing to try things. They didn't like everything, but what they did like far outmatched what they didn't. "Shagrub," Reznib said to Shagrub at one point, in a whisper that could be heard by everyone at the table. "Why didn't no one ever tell us about Cake?"

"Haven't the faintest," said Shagrub. "But we're not telling the others, right? or they'd just hog all of it."

"Others?" asked Piglet. "You mean the really big Orcs?"

"Yeah, them," said Shagrub absently, scraping out his bowl. "Great load of greedy ******* they are." He looked up from his bowl to find Pooh blinking and Piglet gaping at him. "What?"

"Nothing, it's just that…nothing," said Piglet. He looked at Pooh.

"More berries?" Pooh asked Shagrub. "I'm glad you're easier to feed than Tigger," he went on as Shagrub held out his bowl, although he didn't entirely sound like he meant it. Tigger didn't like most of the things Pooh liked, but it seemed that the Orcs did, which made Pooh rather worried about his larder.

Piglet was just happy they didn't like Haycorns.

"Who's Tigger?" Jashit asked.

There followed some exchange of Names and which People went with which Names. Jashit, Shagrub and Reznib learned about Tigger, Kanga, Roo and Owl, while Pooh and Piglet were reacquainted, in somewhat courser language, with the names of Durzlip, Noglash and Warrung in addition to Mauhúr. They were also introduced, for the first time, to the name Grishnákh.

Piglet shuddered when he realized that the goblins were describing the Rude Animal from the stream. "Oh, I didn't like him," he said, shaking his head quickly. "He gave me the shivers. He has such a funny way of looking at you."

Shagrub exchanged a look with Jashit and Reznib, as much as to say, _You Have No Idea._

"Speaking of the shivers, er…" Reznib hesitated, then asked, "what about that, er…friend of yours?" Piglet looked at him blankly. "That one we – Noglash, that is…lit up, like?"

"Oh," said Pooh, with a hint of disapproval. "That was Eeyore."

"And that _wasn't_ very nice," said Piglet, glaring at them. He and Pooh had had a kind of unspoken agreement not to bring up Eeyore with the goblins, but that had just flown out the window. After all, Reznib had brought it up.

"Meaning no offense, I'm sure," said Reznib, "and I think you could see, it wasn't us that done it."

"But you were with the one who did," said Piglet, his eyes narrowed suspiciously. "That one you called Noglash. Your Friend."

"He's no friend of ours," complained Shagrub, making a face. "You should've seen the drubbing that he gave me yesterday."

Piglet's suspicion, while not wholly vanquished, became something more like confusion. "He beat you?"

Shagrub nodded.

"He's an Uruk," Jashit explained. "They're terrible wicked savage."

"He beat Jashit too," Shagrub said. "AND made him climb a tree," he added.

"He made me climb _three_ trees," Jashit corrected him. "Which ain't usually a problem," Jashit went on, "only it just happened these trees were particular dreadsome ones."

"It's not that Noglash is really anything special," said Reznib, seeing the rising consternation of their hosts. "He's a bit extra bad-tempered, maybe, but he's just one Uruk. We've dealt with a long line just like him."

"Whipping us…chasing us…"

"Driving us…"

"…calling us names…"

"It's what they do, you see."

Both Pooh and Piglet had looks of indignation on their faces. "ExCUSE me," said Pooh. He slid down from his chair and stumped off.

The goblins looked at each other, then at Piglet. "Where's he off to, then?"

"I think he's gone to get more honey," said Piglet. "It's what he does when he's Upset."

And indeed, Pooh came back with a great big pot of the stuff. Fortified for further harrowing tales of injustice, he gestured grimly for the goblins to continue.

-.-.-.-

The three Orcs left with a full hamper of food, and not much to say. There was a lot to think about, but speech was a strange prospect for all of them just then. Each of them had deeply conflicted thoughts about the hour they had just passed, as if they had done something forbidden, or at least obscurely perverse. But there was no denying the comfortable feelings in their stomachs, or a sense of general well-being and lingering good humor.

"I'd go back there," said Reznib after a while.

"So would I," said Jashit.

"…I don't really want to tell Mauhúr and the others about it," said Reznib.

"Me neither," said Jashit.

"So here's what we'll do," Shagrub told them. "We'll say what we originally did, which was go to that burrow and see if there was anything to be scrounged there, just like Jashit suggested we should. We can say that we found the basket then."

"Makes sense to me," Reznib agreed. "They did say there was s'posed to've been some kind of party."

Shagrub nodded. "Then later, when we're sent scrounging again, we can go back and ask for more. Wager anything you like they'll give it to us."

"They do seem like very obliging little creatures, don't they?" Jashit said.

Reznib did not say anything, but he fingered Piglet's scarf.

Meanwhile, back at Pooh's home under the name of Sanders, Piglet was very thoughtful. "Pooh," he said, "Orcs are certainly one of the Fiercer Animals. Much, much fiercer than Kangas."

Pooh made a noise of agreement.

"But they also seem very Sad to me," said Piglet. "All that Running and Fighting they told us about, and the Bosses, and the Big Whips."

"I know, Piglet," said Pooh. "It really doesn't sound very nice."

Piglet nodded. "Pooh?" he said after a moment.

"Yes, Piglet?"

"We have to tell Rabbit, don't we."

"Yes, Piglet."

"I showed them where we live," said Piglet, looking at the ground. He couldn't help a small sniffle. What a foolish creature he had been! Inviting such fierce animals into the home of his beloved friend, who had always done so kindly by him.

"We both showed them together," Pooh reminded him.

"Yes, but you _had_ to show them. I led them right to you, after all." Piglet wiped at his eyes.

"But I would have showed them anyway," said Pooh, shrugging. "You were right, Piglet. They were hungry. We couldn't just let them go hungry."

Piglet didn't say anything. Now that it was done and in the past, he could not stop wondering how he might have handled things differently. This was not an unfamiliar sort of wondering for Piglet.

"You must have been frightened when they ran away with you," said Pooh. "You were very brave for offering to lead them back." He leaned down and hugged Piglet so firmly that Piglet squeaked in surprise. "I was frightened for you," Pooh said.

"I was frightened for me too," said Piglet. He closed his eyes and hugged Pooh back.

-.-.-.-

"Eh, Noglash," said Durzlip, picking his teeth. "When do you think Mauhúr and Warrung and that Grishnákh will be getting back?"

"How should I know?" asked Noglash. "But I think Grishnákh said he was some three or four hours on his walkabout."

"That was at night, though," said Durzlip. "I would reckon day travel is faster, wouldn't you?" He was, of course, operating by an Uruk's notion of night travel: a much more stop-and-go process for them than normal travel beneath the light of a forthright sun.

"Yes, you're right," said Noglash. "They should be getting back any time now."

"Unless they ran into that donkey thing," said Durzlip.

Noglash shuddered. "Don't joke about that, friend. I can't get it out of my mind. Queer fucking thing."

Durzlip shook his head. "Everything's been queer lately. Tree houses and talking rabbits…"

"…fucking wind coming out of fucking nowhere…"

"Still," said Durzlip. "It's made sort of a nice breather, when you think about it."

Noglash stared at him. "How do you reckon that?"

"Well think about it, Nogles. What do you imagine we'll be doing when we get back to Isengard?"

"You want to know what I think?" Noglash was frowning. "I'm thinking we're in for a few good cuts on the back."

Durzlip snorted. "More than a few, if I know justice in Isengard."

"And _if_ we don't receive floggings or get written up as cowards, we'll just be sent out again," Noglash continued. " _If_ we aren't slaughtered to an Orc by those bloody trees on the way back."

"Like Nulak," said Durzlip, giving Noglash a sidelong glance.

Noglash opened his mouth, looking like he was going to make a sharp retort, but his shoulders slumped. "Yeah," he said. "Like Nulak." It was the first he'd really acknowledged what they had both seen happen to his mate Nulak, and Durzlip pushed a companionable hand against his shoulder. Noglash sighed, and opened his mouth like he was about to say something, when his eyes narrowed as he looked past Durzlip. "Oi," he said loudly, the usual aggression in his voice as he gave a meaningful jerk of his head. "Look who finally came wandering back!"

"Oh, they're back, are they?" asked Durzlip, pulling away and looking in the same direction as Noglash. "Hi, you lot! What's that you're carrying there?" Jashit and Reznib had it slung between them by both handles: a kind of large wicker basket with a checkered red and white cloth over it. As they reached the two Uruk-hai they lowered the basket into the grass.

"What's in there?" demanded Noglash.

"Comestibles for your delectation," announced Shagrub grandly. He gestured toward Jashit, who pulled back the cloth to reveal the basket's contents.

The Uruk-hai, who would have dined happily on raw venison or bloody leg of lamb, looked blankly at the jars and breadstuffs within. "What the shit is that?" asked Durzlip in frank amazement at what they were being presented with.

"It's food, and I'll thank you not to knock it," said Shagrub, sniffing. "We risked life and limb to find it, and I think you'll find it much to your satisfaction if you'll just give it a try."

"'Life and limb'? The fuck you say." Noglash picked up a jar and, straightening, held it up to the sun. The light that shown through it glowed like fire in the heart of a ruby. "And what's this?"

"Sir, it's jam, sir," said Jashit with some deference. "Strawberry, I think."

"…" Noglash looking at Jashit as if the goblin had sprouted a second head. He turned and handed the jar to Durzlip, who took it gingerly. Turning back to the expectant Jashit: "If I weren't fucking starving I'd smash the whole thing over your ridiculous head," he growled. "WHAT made you think we'd want to eat fucking…jam?"

"You don't eat the jam by itself," explained Reznib. "What you do is, see, there are scones in there as well, and what you do is, you TAKE the scones, and you spread the jam…"

"Where did you get it from?" asked Durzlip. "You'll never tell me you just found this lying about in the woods."

"Oh, well – " Reznib looked at Shagrub.

"We went back to the burrow," said Shagrub. "You know, the one from yesterday. We thought maybe we'd give it a once over."

Noglash's eyes narrowed. "So what were you doing in there for so long yesterday, that you didn't find it then?"

Shagrub looked like he had just swallowed a toad. "Well, you know," said Reznib, interjecting on his behalf, "yesterday was a touch chaotic, you may recall."

Jashit nodded. "Right.

"That rabbit thing, you know, and then the fire, and the running away…"

"We did our best," said Shagrub.

Durzlip had picked up one of the scones and was eyeing it. In his large broad hand it looked a paltry thing, but he bit off half of it and chewed deliberately before swallowing. A thoughtful look came over his harsh features. "Hey, it's not bad, Noglash," he told the other Uruk. "I'd eat more of this. Just try one."

Noglash rolled his eyes but suffered himself to take a bite.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is artwork for this chapter! Check out [Consuming Comestibles](http://illvetti.deviantart.com/art/Consuming-Comestibles-534318116) by the very kind Illvetti.


	17. In Which Mauhúr Makes a Resolve, and There Is an Interruption.

When Mauhúr had awoken that morning, he applied himself to quietly and methodically ensuring that everyone steered clear of the oak tree, until there was no one left except for himself and Grishnákh. Grishnákh was still very much asleep, which was perhaps not surprising in view of the late hour when the Mordor Orc had made his return, but Mauhúr had been prepared to discover otherwise: to find Grishnákh awake and watchful, cold gaze and biting sarcasm in readiness. But Grishnákh’s great head was sunk down upon his chest, his breathing unaffectedly adenoidal and heavy.

As Mauhúr dropped into a slow crouch before him, the Orc’s eyes began to move behind their sunken lids. Thin lips twisted in a grimace that might have been confusion or pain. He could at that moment have been stirring, about to wake, or slipping into the start of some ill dream.

“Grishnákh.”

Broad nostrils flared. Malevolent eyes opened as Grishnákh roused to his name, fixing them upon Mauhúr.

Mauhúr leaned forward. “I want to know what you saw.”

He said nothing, waiting with his patient evil face for the Uruk to ask.

Studying him in the moment and later, thinking back on it, Mauhúr did not believe that Grishnákh answered his questions with any hesitation or deceit. Then again, there was little need for trickery. The interrogation was a straightforward one, the questions neither difficult nor unexpected. Where had Grishnákh gone? When had he left? What had he seen? What happened then?

And then? What happened after that?

As the interview wore on, Grishnákh began to smile in seeming amusement, though it did not reach his eyes. In his first and only departure from the main line of inquiry, Mauhúr asked what was so funny. “I expected you to be keen on what and where,” said Grishnákh. “But aren’t you going to ask me why?”

Mauhúr looked at him and shrugged. “I’m not sure how relevant it would be to my own purpose, or how far I can trust you to be honest. But if you’re anxious to share, then by all means. Why _did_ you leave last night, Grishnákh? Did you accomplish what it was you set out to do? Find what you were looking for? I doubt it. I don’t think you would have returned if your excursion was a success.”

Grishnákh’s mouth tightened. When next he spoke, it was to take up, in an uninflected voice, the terrain that he had traveled and the landmarks he had noted along the way. These Mauhúr did not hesitate to quiz him about further, and by the time the interview drew to a close, there was an understanding between them. There would be no more impromptu sightseeing, not without Mauhúr’s knowledge – but Mauhúr would see these things, and Grishnákh would be the one to show them to him, very soon.

“I’m surprised,” Grishnákh said afterward, when the interrogation was over, “that you would not have asked our little friend Shagrub some of these questions you have asked me. I know that you appointed him my watchdog. Or didn’t you question him about my activities before you spoke with me?”

“Yes…funny you should mention ‘little Shagrub.’ He seemed very disturbed when I spoke with him about you this morning, although he gave me no definite reason why. Perhaps you have some explanation?”

“Oh, who’s to say what might or might not have been on his mind, or why these goblin Orcs do anything they do. You oughtn’t to put too much faith in little mountain snaga, Mauhúr. They have their uses, but they’re not what I would call reliable.”

Mauhúr smiled slightly. “Nonetheless, I’ll thank you not to intimidate the snaga Orcs, Grishnákh. They’re in my charge now, so I’m afraid I can’t allow you to bully them too badly while I have some responsibility for their welfare.”

Grishnákh laughed. “Their _welfare_! That _is_ noble of you, I must say. I wouldn’t have expected an Orc of your…stature…to have much use for the littler folk. Or is there something I’m missing? They aren’t any of them from Isengard, are they?”

“No, they’re none of mine. But then, I don’t have many of mine left, do I? They are here now, anyhow, and so I have staked my claim on them.”

For all his smirking earlier, it was obvious now that Grishnákh was genuinely amused. “I would not have thought it if I didn’t see that it was so. Can it be you’ve actually taken those little deserters to your bosom?”

Mauhúr sighed. “Grishnákh. You are a snake, but I would take _you_ to my bosom if I could trust you not to bite. Few as we are at present, surely even you can see that it would be better for us to cooperate with one another. We are more together than if we try to stand alone.”

“Alone.” The smile was still on Grishnákh’s face, but the life had gone out of it. “Well, so far as that goes. Even by ourselves, we are only as alone as we think we are.” His hand drifted toward the Eye that hung from his neck.

-.-.-.-

The ground south of the Wood was waterlogged, both to the southwest and the southeast. Several streams converged directly south of the Wood, just as they did to its north, but the southern ground was at a lower elevation and so the earth there was more sodden. It may have been that the ground was like this in some part because of rains in March and April, and of course a normal spring thaw, but Warrung suspected the area they were passing through was boggy and sad at the best of times.

He was walking next to Mauhúr, with Grishnákh up ahead of them. Despite the notorious confidence and endurance of Saruman’s Uruk-hai, and despite Warrung’s skills and well-attuned senses, both he and Mauhúr were flagging a little, careful where they put their feet, and rather amazed at the unbroken gait of Grishnákh of Mordor. The Orc seemed hardly to look where he was going, moving with an intent and an intensity that appeared unaffected by the sunlight that gave such pause to other Orcs of his kind. Whereas the other snaga Orcs, had they been along, would have cringed and panted and complained, Grishnákh’s swift grimaces might as easily have been in response to some unusually foul smell or taste. Certainly it made no change in his manner otherwise. He would come back or stop and wait for them from time to time when Mauhúr called him to heel, make report of how this leg of their journey had struck him when he covered the same ground the night before. Little fault in anything he said: it was sparse but to the point, without his usual sarcasm or superior commentary, though Warrung could certainly sense both lurking behind the Orc’s bland exterior.

Warrung didn’t need to care about Grishnákh’s attitude the way Mauhúr did. It was annoying, but it was no challenge to his authority; Warrung _had_ no authority over Grishnákh. He was, however, fascinated by Grishnákh’s breezy approach to the boggier or floodier areas through which they traveled. He wondered where the Mordor Orc had picked up such confidence traversing this kind of terrain. It didn’t all come of walking it last night, surely!

He said these things privately to Mauhúr first, gaging Mauhúr’s own curiosity before he actually asked Grishnákh outright about his experience with bogs and marshland. Grishnákh was surprised at the question, but he answered readily enough. He had on several occasions crossed the swamplands, sometimes called the Dead Marshes, of the Emyn Muil, which other Orcs and Men avoided for miles around but which Grishnákh had never hesitated to cut through for the sake of a speedier passage.

“There are those,” he said with some disdain, “who claim the ground is poisonous or that they see dead things in the water. Rubbish. The only thing you need to worry about, going through there, is maybe getting your feet a little wet if you aren’t careful – and if that’s enough to put you off your feed, you haven’t got any business going there in the first place.”

“So you’ve made more than one crossing out of Mordor,” remarked Mauhúr.

Grishnákh shut his mouth, eyes gone briefly wary before they became implacable once more.

Warrung glanced between the two of them, his boss and Grishnákh, and sensed the presence of subtleties beyond both his knowing and his desire to know.

And Mauhúr? Mauhúr wondered – just as, unbeknownst to him, Uglúk had wondered once before – what private knowledge Grishnákh possessed; how he came by it; to what final end he was hoping to put it. Wondered what part Grishnákh played in the schemes of Mordor, that he was permitted such license in his comings and goings. Most Orcs, Uruk-hai included, are not fully their own agents, and the Will to which Grishnákh swore allegiance was many magnitudes beyond him. How great, then, or how small, was the remove at which Grishnákh served his Master? An Orc like Grishnákh should have been little more than an ant in the sight of the Eye: certainly not worthy of any special notice.

Mauhúr did not believe it was only some Uruk arrogance of his own that made him think this. For all his sense of self-worth, he doubted that the Eye would take much note of him either. It was one of the things he found most puzzling about Grishnákh and his obvious reverence for the Dark Lord of Mordor. At least Saruman paid attention to his soldiery, gracing them with the direct power of his wizardly Voice, instilling them with the confidence of their own supremacy and of victory, giving them Man-flesh to eat. Loyalty to a Master like Saruman made sense. Mauhúr could not imagine giving such loyalty to the Eye.

They crossed yet another stream and a few small trickles. The Wood was on their left now, and up ahead was the big tree with the unusually long branch. As they climbed the last slow rise, they found Noglash and Durzlip sprawled on the ground next to a large wicker basket, which had vomited its contents onto the grass.

“What’s all this?” Mauhúr greeted them as he approached. He looked at the basket with some bemusement.

“Good eats,” said Durzlip.

“Those mountain rats actually made themselves useful for once,” Noglash agreed as he picked up another raspberry tart.

“What, the snaga Orcs found it?” Warrung was surprised.

Durzlip grunted with amusement. “Well, me and Noglash couldn’t very well go traipsing off while we were guarding the base, now could we?”

“All right, all right,” Warrung shrugged, conceding the point. Bending down, he broke off a piece of something dark and sweet.

Grishnákh frowned. He had picked up a discarded jam jar and was sniffing it. “And you’re… _eating_ this?” he asked with some distaste.

Noglash and Durzlip, too contented just then to take offence, only glanced at one another. “It’s good food,” said Durzlip, and Noglash nodded in agreement.

“Where are the Moria Orcs?” asked Mauhúr.

“Them? They’ve crawled away into their little hidey-hole,” said Noglash, gesturing toward the tree.

Mauhúr glanced at Warrung, who went to the small green door and called for them.

When they were all eight of them – the Uruk-hai, the goblins, and Grishnákh of Mordor – assembled on the grass, Mauhúr began to speak, making report of what he and Warrung had seen on their expedition with Grishnákh. He gave a general assessment of the fertile valley and the Wood that they could all see below them, the time it had taken them to walk around it, and the number and disposition of streams that they had crossed along the way. He described several detours that they had made at each of the four ordinals, beginning with the northeast, past the big stones and rocks. It was true that Mauhúr had sent Durzlip and Noglash there the day before, but he had still wanted to confirm what they said to him with his own eyes – there was nothing to show that they could get to Fangorn back the way they had originally come. The Outlands stretched as far as the eye could see – and, as they had gone on to find thereafter, it was the same to the northwest and at each of the southern ordinals as well.

“So what’s all that mean, then?” said Reznib nervously. “Are you saying there’s no way for us to get home?”

Shagrub narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “Are you saying you don’t know where we are?”

“We know where we are,” said Warrung. “We just don’t know where that is.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” Jashit whispered to Reznib.

Mauhúr quelled them with a glance. “Warrung is right,” he said. “We know something now about where we are. We’ve had time now to get the lay of the land and to make some kind of a mental map of the area. There are no Men in this place and no signs of any other People we might have to worry about, like Dwarves or Elves. All of the habitation around here seems to belong to more Animals of the sort we encountered yesterday. There’s no one here to challenge us or do us harm – real harm, I mean, not counting our alarm of yesterday afternoon. That was disturbing, I won’t say it wasn’t, but we weren’t actually attacked as such, and none of us came away with any injury.

“Yes,” said Grishnákh, rolling his eyes. “Because we all Ran Away.”

“Leave it, Grishnákh,” Noglash rumbled.

“Running was sensible under the circumstances,” said Mauhúr, undisturbed by Grishnákh’s insinuating tone. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with. We still don’t, not fully, but next time we won’t run. We will stand our ground, and we will fight if we have to. We will see if a thing that burns and does not die may yet be made to bleed.”

The ominous pause that attended his words was completely broken by what came next.

“I SAY!” a voice called down to them. “Hallo, you fellows!”

“What the – ” Durzlip exclaimed, giving a start and looking up quickly. “Where the **** did _that_ come from?”

High above them, on the Unusually Long Branch stretching far out overhead, a very large Owl was peering down at them.


	18. In Which Rabbit Has a Bad Night, and Owl Receives an Important Mission.

Rabbit’s night had not been an easy one. It was not for lack of accommodation by Owl, who was immensely concerned that his guests retire with every possible comfort. In fact, Owl was so solicitous of their comfort that even Eeyore’s sarcasm was finally exhausted and the donkey simply became silent and unresponsive. That was when Rabbit Thanked Owl Very Kindly, but, “You see,” he said, “I think dear Eeyore is very tired, and perhaps it would be better if we all just – “

“ – say no more, say no more,” said Owl, “I know JUST what you mean. As my Uncle Robert once told my second cousin Heloise – I think I’ve told you about her before – ‘Heloise,’ he said, “if you would only shut your beak for two minutes I think that…’”

“Yes yes,” said Rabbit, not wanting to hear what Uncle Robert had said to Heloise, “it’s just like that, I’m sure.” He jerked his head several times in succession toward Eeyore, silent on the hearthrug.

Finally Owl took his point. “Yes, well. Pleasant dreams, then, and do let me know if there is anything else that I can do for you.”

When Owl had finally retired to bed, Rabbit asked Eeyore if there was anything he needed. “Oh,” said Eeyore, “another round of questions just like that one, Rabbit, should do me nicely.”

Rabbit started to apologize, decided not to, and turned his _Sorry_ into a sort of a cough instead. “Well, then. Er. Good night then, Eeyore,” he said, and he settled himself into Owl’s comfortably overstuffed armchair to sleep.

Sleep, however, was not quickly forthcoming. Every time Rabbit closed his eyes it seemed that he could hear mocking laughter, and the quick hiss of flames. It did not help that this was coupled with the real burnt smell in the room (Eeyore still smelt a trifle Scorchy.) And then, when Rabbit’s eyelids had fully settled, and his breathing had relaxed into the deeper breathing of a vanishing consciousness…

Eeyore began to kick.

Not that Rabbit knew what it was at first. He only knew that his eyes shot open as a strangled noise came from the floor, coupled with a violent thumping. Something Was In The Room With Him, and he leapt up on both feet to find himself balancing precariously on the thick cushion of an armchair, not his own, and looking around him frantically in the dark.

As memory returned and he remembered where he was and why, he thought that one of the F.B.A. had somehow broken into Owl’s home, and he was about to cry out in alarm when he suddenly guessed what else he might be hearing.

“Eeyore,” he whispered urgently. “Eeyore, is that you?” He hopped down onto the floor and received a kick to the leg that made him yelp. It was, indeed, Eeyore, striking out in his sleep. “Eeyore, stop it! _Stop it_ , Eeyore,” he demanded. Somehow, through no small dint of grabbing around in the dark, he was able to catch hold of the struggling donkey.

Eeyore’s whimpering subsided. “…Rabbit?” he asked slowly.

“You were _dreaming_ , Eeyore.”

Eeyore gave a shuddering laugh. “Fun and Games.”

“Yes, well,” said Rabbit rather crossly, as he rubbed the new sore spot on his leg. “I think that’s quite enough.”

“Yes, Rabbit. I agree with you completely.”

Rabbit felt around the donkey and realized: “You are all tangled up in my comforter. Let me straighten it out for you.”

Eeyore shuddered again. “If you please, I’d rather you not.”

“?”

“I’d…rather not have the comforter, actually. It feels like something…On Me,” Eeyore explained.

“Oh,” said Rabbit. He hesitated. “Well. May I have it, then?”

“If you REALLY insist on it,” said Eeyore. “Yes, you may.”

Rabbit took the comforter off of Eeyore and wrapped it around himself instead, then got down on the floor. Hesitating, he touched Eeyore’s back. The donkey was lying on his side, facing away from Rabbit. “If I lie just here,” Rabbit said, “will it feel as if _I_ am too much on you?”

Eeyore shifted a little. “No, Rabbit. I can tell it’s you, you see.”

“All right,” said Rabbit, and pressing his back against Eeyore’s, he made himself comfortable.

“I wonder why my foot hurts,” said Eeyore after a moment of silence.

Rabbit’s leg throbbed where Eeyore had kicked it. “I really can’t imagine,” he said flatly.

-.-.-.-

It would be pleasant to report that the night improved from there out and that both slept a sleep unbroken and untroubled, but such was not the case. From time to time Rabbit would find himself jarred awake by the jerk of Eeyore’s back as the donkey began, again, to buck and kick, and Rabbit would quickly soothe and reacquaint Eeyore with his surroundings. What began as an exercise in comfort became rather brusquer as the hours wore on –

(“Dreaming _again_ , Eeyore.” 

“Thank you, Rabbit. I Hadn’t Guessed.”)

– and Rabbit began to despair of getting any proper rest at all. 

With the arrival of morning and the first rumors of the dawn chorus, he crossed the slough of despond and arrived at a strange peace with the realization that those little snatches between kicks were all the sleep he was going to get. It was around then that Eeyore roused as well, with a sardonic tilt of the head toward Rabbit. “And now,” he said, “we are well-rested and refreshed, and ready for the day ahead. Aren’t we, Rabbit.”

“Oh yes,” said Rabbit dully. “Never better.”

-.-.-.-

Little wonder, then, that as tired and stiff and irritable as Rabbit was after his restless night, he received Pooh and Piglet’s news of their adventure that morning with less than perfect composure.

-.-.-.-

“…And then,” finished Piglet, “we gave them Kanga’s picnic hamper and told them to take it with them, so that the others would have something to eat as well.”

“I do hope,” said Pooh, as the thought occurred to him, “that she won’t be terribly cross with us if we don’t get it back.” And with that, their story came to an end.

Rabbit stared at them.

Piglet fidgeted.

Somebody in the room coughed. 

It was Eeyore, who was clearing his throat. “Well now,” he said in his slow, heavy voice. “Well now. This is all very interesting, but there is one thing I do feel I must ask.”

“Yes, Eeyore,” said Piglet in a very small voice.

“Did they _like_ the scones, little Piglet.”

“I think they did, Eeyore,” whispered Piglet.

“Well then,” said the donkey. “That’s nice. As long as you all had such a Pleasant Time.”

Piglet flinched and studied the floor.

“What were you THINKING?” Rabbit asked, finally finding The Words. “What WERE you thinking?”

“They were hungry,” said Piglet miserably.

“They said they were starving,” said Pooh.

“They Lit Eeyore On FIRE!”

“Only a little one, mind you,” said Eeyore. “But thank you, Rabbit. It helps, somehow, to know that somebody else Remembers.”

“They Broke Into My HOUSE! They Burned My Front DOOR!”

“Vandalism, of course, being the worser evil,” agreed Eeyore. He had been standing since the arrival of Pooh and Piglet, but now he settled himself on his hindquarters to watch as Rabbit continued to Erupt.

“They Were Going To KILL Me! And You Invited Them In For **_TEA_**?!”

“It wasn’t _really_ tea,” squeaked Piglet.

“It was more like elevenses,” said Pooh.

Rabbit’s black eyes were rimmed with white. He was breathing very quickly. 

“I say, old man,” Owl broke in. He had been listening with great interest to everything that Pooh and Piglet had to relate, and while he could understand why Eeyore and Rabbit might be annoyed, he was alarmed at the strength of Rabbit’s reaction. “Should I fetch a paper bag for you to breathe into?”

Rabbit waved him off impatiently.

“I’m not sure,” said Pooh, with a somewhat questioning look at Rabbit, “what you think we ought to have done instead. Of course, I’m only a Bear of Very Little Brain,” he went on, “but there were three of them, and two of us; and before that happened, there were three of them, and one of Piglet. He did what he needed to do, and I did what I thought for the best. Neither of us came to any harm…”

“You were Fraternizing!” Rabbit accused him. “You weren’t doing it because you were afraid. You were doing it because they said they were hungry. You were giving aid and comfort to the Enemy!”

Pooh, condemned, hung down his head.

Piglet grabbed at his paw and squeezed it. “Stop yelling at him!” he scolded Rabbit, rallying to defend Bear’s honor. “Unless you can say what you would have done instead, you shouldn’t yell at him, or at me either!”

Rabbit stared at Piglet. There was a moment’s silence, and into the quiet, there came a loud knock. 

“I’ll get it,” said Owl quickly as he began to make a retreat.

“ **CHECK FIRST!** ” Eeyore bellowed after Owl, which so startled Owl that he tripped over his own feet on the way to his front door. 

Rabbit, Pooh and Piglet all looked at Eeyore in some surprise. 

“All of these Comings and Goings,” Eeyore muttered darkly. “We’ll have Orcs in this parlor too before we know it.”

There came another knock. Recovering himself, Owl rapped on his side of the door. “Who is it?” he called to whoever was on the other side.

The others listened closely from where they were but couldn’t decifer the response: nonetheless, they saw Owl brighten. “Just a moment, then,” he said, turning the doorknob.

“Of course,” Eeyore said to himself, “I suppose Checking doesn’t much matter when no one can be bothered to lock their doors…” as Kanga and Roo came in, preceded by Tigger. 

It is fortunate that Eeyore wasn’t standing at that moment, or it is likely that he would have been bowled over. As it was, there was a mild confusion of limbs before the two were extricated from their jumble. “Hallo, Eeyore,” said Tigger when both had rearranged themselves somewhat. He crouched down so that he was nose to nose with Eeyore. “Are you _much_ better now?” he asked, his eyes bare inches from Eeyore’s, which grew wide at this sudden proximity.

“Tigger dear,” said Kanga, “do go gently in Owl’s house, and try not to be quite so Bouncy with Eeyore.”

Tigger hopped up onto Owl’s armchair, while Eeyore, a little shaken after Tigger’s exuberant greeting, supposed he was just lucky not to have been standing next to a river this time.

“We gave out Circulars!” Roo told everyone excitedly. “We gave out lots and lots!”

“We gave out three,” said Kanga. “The three that you gave us, Rabbit. And also we told as many animals as we could tell.”

“That’s fine,” said Rabbit rather shortly.

Kanga, surprised at his tone, gave him a puzzled look. “Is something the matter?” she asked. Everyone, with the exceptions of Roo, Tigger, and Kanga, looked awkward and began to shuffle their feet and so on, which did not escape Kanga’s notice. “Has something new happened?” she guessed.

With much stumbling and stuttering from Piglet, a good many sharp interjections by Rabbit, and some humble contributions from Pooh, the whole sorry tale soon came out.

“Is that so?” she asked, very much surprised when they had come to the end of it. “Well of course it’s all right that you gave them my hamper, Pooh dear. It’s sounds as if they needed it more than I do. Of course if we are able to get it back that will be all the better – it is an especially nice hamper for picnics – but it’s not as if I don’t have other baskets.”

“But Kanga,” began Rabbit in some consternation.

“Well really, Rabbit,” said Kanga. “What else did you expect them to do? Those creatures were hungry. You can’t really think that Pooh and Piglet should have allowed them to go hungry!”

Piglet’s ears had been drooping ever since they had told their story to Rabbit. Now he began to perk up a little, as did Pooh.

“But what about what they did to Eeyore!” exclaimed Rabbit, gesturing angrily toward Eeyore.

“Well, as to that,” said Kanga, and she looked at the donkey. “Eeyore,” she said kindly, “Do you think that these Fierce Bad Animals, these Orcs, should go hungry for what they did to you?”

“One of them,” Piglet spoke up timidly. “What one of them did.”

“Do you think, Eeyore, that they should all go hungry for what one of them did?” she repeated the question.

Eeyore, who wasn’t about to be bullied by Kanga or by anybody else, shook his head irritably as he looked around him. “I don’t much care if Pooh wants to feed these Orcs three square meals a day or if he means to let them starve. I only care that what happened to me doesn’t happen to anybody else.”

“So why don’t we put our minds to that,” said Kanga, looking at Rabbit, “and not waste time blaming each other?”

Rabbit opened his mouth, gazed around at the other seven, then closed it again. “Fine,” he said at last, crossly. “Why don’t we do that?”

So that is what they did. There was a little period of silence in which no one said much of anything.

“…I have an idea,” said Pooh. They all looked at him. “Well, it isn’t an idea, really. It’s more of a Notion, for how we might come up with an idea.”

“Pooh,” said Rabbit impatiently, “what is it?”

“It’s something you can do,” Pooh told him. “Why don’t you read your list of Questions again from yesterday? If we hear them all again, perhaps they will get us into a Thinking fame of mind.”

This suggestion put Rabbit, still sulky about being shown up by Kanga, into a somewhat better temper. “But I will have to find them first,” he said. They all waited for him to shuffle through his notes from the day before. “All right,” he said, and began to read aloud. 

When he had got to Question the Fifth (“Where are the F.B.A. right now, and what are they doing?”), Piglet spoke up. “We haven’t done that yet,” he said.

“Done what?”

“Found out,” he said. “Where the F.B.A. – I mean, where the Orcs are. We saw three of them this morning,” he explained, “or at least Pooh and I did, but that doesn’t account for the rest of them. Perhaps, if we found out where they were, we could go on from there?”

“Piglet,” said Owl in a voice of deep approval, “I think that is an eminently sensible suggestion.”

“…I’ll go him one better,” said Rabbit. He spoke slowly, but his thoughts had been greatly stimulated by going over his own list of Questions, and despite his lack of sleep, his mind had begun to work very quickly indeed. “I think I have an idea that will help us to settle Questions the Fifth, Sixth, _and_ the Fourth.” (“What was Question the Fourth again?” Pooh asked Piglet, who shushed him because he wanted to hear what Rabbit had to say.) “And there is One Person we shall have to depend upon for it,” finished Rabbit, turning to Owl. “Owl, your help is absolutely necessary for the success of this mission.”

“I shall try my best, of course,” said Owl, fluffing up a bit. Upon reflection, he was not sure whether to be surprised, flattered, or apprehensive, so he decided on all three.

“Very good,” said Rabbit, looking around the room. “Now all of you, listen closely. Here is what I think we should do.”


	19. In Which Owl Delivers an Important Communiqué and Mauhúr Goes To the Beech.

“I SAY! Hallo, you fellows!”

“What the – Where the **** did _that_ come from?”

“ _Ow_ ,” said Noglash, holding the back of his neck. He had brought his head up so suddenly that it had actually given him whiplash.

“How long has _that_ been there?” demanded Jashit, pointing up at the enormous owl.

“More to the point, why didn’t any of us notice when it showed up in the first place?” said Shagrub, staring.

“Owls don’t make any sound when they fly,” remarked Warrung.

Shagrub looked at him in amazement. “What, not even when they’re that big?”

Warrung shrugged. “Evidently not.”

“Is that all of you down there?” called the owl. “I have been entrusted with a most important communiqué, but I need to know that you are all there to receive it.”

Several of the Orcs exchanged glances, wondering what a communiqué was. No one seemed to be answering the owl’s question, so Reznib called up hesitantly, “Yes, this is all of us…?” followed by a yelp as Noglash slapped the back of his head.

“You little fool!” Noglash hissed. “What are you thinking, giving away our numbers like that?!”

“Oh excellent! So it’s just the eight of you?” asked the owl. (In fact, Owl had counted them several times now to be sure. Splendid! That went to Question the Third. Rabbit would be so pleased…)

Reznib, rubbing the back of his head, flinched under the glare being visited upon him by all four of the Uruk-hai. So much for keeping in Mauhúr’s good graces.

“Well,” said Mauhúr, looking up at the owl as he addressed it, “what do you want?”

“Congress, dear boy! You are invited to my house for a lengthy disquisition, a symposium if you will, to be held at four-of-the-clock this afternoon!”

“A dista…what?” Durzlip looked at Mauhúr, baffled.

“We want to _talk_ with you,” the owl explained helpfully.

“What about?” Mauhúr demanded.

“We want to discuss your intentions, and to see if we can arrive at some happy medium for arbitration.”

“You want to _negotiate_ with us,” Mauhúr restated more simply, his eyes narrowing. He already knew he would not win in a game of who-can-use-the-longest-words with this creature, and he was not going to try. Glancing at his fellow Uruk-hai: “How do we know this isn’t a trap?”

“You aren’t afraid of us, surely?” The owl sounded surprised.

“What’s your name?”

It puffed up proudly. “Tresspassers Owl; Owl to my friends. You may call me Owl as well – I know that it’s rather a long name.”

“ _Owl_ ,” Mauhúr muttered, remembering Rabbit and Piglet. Why was he not surprised. “Owl, where do you live?”

“On the other side of the Wood, near the floody place. There is a very grand beech tree you will find just beyond a small spinney of larches. We will wait for you there,” said Owl. It leaned forward and cast off into the breeze, evidently thinking the matter settled. “Remember!” it called importantly as it made a pass over their heads. “Four o’clock! Punctuality is a Virtue…!” Wheeling, it flapped off over the forest.

All heads turned as the Orcs watched Owl go. Then everyone looked at Mauhúr, excepting Mauhúr, who looked at everyone else.

“So are we going?” asked Jashit.

“ _Let’s_ ,” said Noglash, with a slightly manic grin. “We’ve played it safe for long enough now. I am ready to start ripping off heads.” The arrival and departure of this latest talking animal had aroused all of his more bloodthirsty feelings.

“Do you think it _is_ a trap of some sort?” Warrung asked Mauhúr.

“Does it really matter if it is?” Durzlip asked in turn. “Flaming donkey or not, I’m not going to be afraid of these creatures.”

“Nor am I,” said Mauhúr. “I think it’s time we settle some things for once and for all.” He looked at Grishnákh. “Unless Mordor has another opinion on the matter?” he asked dryly.

Grishnákh glowered, fingering the Eye around his neck. Sneering as he responded: “I’m certainly not afraid, if _Isengard_ wants to lead the way.”

“Then it’s decided,” said Mauhúr, looking around him. (“It is?” Reznib looked startled and alarmed. Shagrub hushed him, and Mauhúr ignored them both.) “We make for the beech tree,” he said.

-.-.-.-

“You told them four o’clock?” said Rabbit.

“You did say just about tea-time, didn’t you?” asked Owl, who had returned from his lengthy flight over the forest.

“No no, that’s right,” Rabbit responded. “I’m just not sure – ”

“I don’t think any of them have time-pieces,” said Piglet.

“And they’ve really been staying in Christopher Robin’s old house?” Pooh asked Owl. Owl nodded. Pooh looked deeply unhappy.

“It makes sense,” muttered Rabbit. “They would have to have overnighted somewhere, and the house has been unoccupied for a very long time now.” But there was a distasteful look on his face. “Still… What extraordinary cheek!”

“It probably doesn’t matter, Pooh,” Piglet comforted his friend. “Christopher Robin doesn’t live there any more, so he – he can’t possibly mind.”

Pooh Bear nodded glumly.

“Where are the others?” Owl asked.

“They’re in your tree getting Eeyore ready,” said Rabbit. “He wanted Kanga to patch his face up now, rather than waiting on it. He didn’t – he doesn’t want those awful Orcs to see what they did to him.”

“What a brave fellow he is,” said Owl in a solemn voice. The others nodded.

-.-.-.-

Mauhúr did not post anyone to remain at the tall oak. It was all or none of them at this point – no sense in holding anybody back. As they walked, he thought grimly that the “meeting” ahead of them was unlikely to result in much more than a lot of dead animals. Nonetheless, in his heart he continued to turn over the hope that someone at the beech tree might yield answers to the questions that vexed him. How had they come here? How were they to go back? How was he to discharge his duty to Saruman and the Uruk dead at Fangorn, and return with his lads to Isengard again?

Shagrub was preoccupied with other concerns. Although there was no way for him to discuss it with Jashit and Reznib in such close proximity to the larger Orcs, and Mauhúr certainly would not tolerate it if they used their more discreet goblin dialect, they nonetheless communicated with each other through worried glances and anxious grimaces. They did not know who was going to be at the beech tree when they got there, but if Pooh and Piglet were there and it came out that they were the source of the goblins’ hamper of food, Shagrub and his fellow snaga were sure to be punished for the cover-up.

Of course, most likely, Shagrub thought, there would be a terrific massacre, and all of the animals, Piglet and Pooh included, would be wiped out before anything embarrassing came to light. That would be the best outcome, he thought. It wasn’t that Shagrub disliked Pooh or Piglet. Quite the opposite – it was, in a small and unacknowledged way, the reason why he and the others had lied in the first place. But saving his own skin still came first.

Meanwhile, Grishnákh followed along, the hindermost of their company, keeping his own counsel. Earlier, he had led Mauhúr and Warrung on their merry trek widdershins around the Wood. Now they were going back the way they had come earlier, east to west, keeping to the eaves of the southermost trees but staying clear of the wetter areas further down. Mauhúr and Warrung were both at the head of their little procession: they remembered the exact location of the beech tree that Owl had spoken of, and no need to consult Grishnákh about it. As it turned out, their tour with him had proven useful sooner than they, or even Grishnákh himself, could have anticipated.

As Grishnákh studied the back of Mauhúr’s skull (what glimpses he saw of it, past the fat heads of Durzlip and Noglash), he thought about what he was going to do. Like Shagrub and Mauhúr, Grishnákh was anticipating a massacre, but as for what part he himself was going to play, he did not know. Ought he to distinguish himself by dint of battle prowess or special cruelty – find some way to elevate himself in Mauhúr’s eyes and earn his respect? Or would it do his cause more good if Mauhúr should fall by some terrible mischance or… _accident_ …so that Grishnákh of Mordor might come forward and take charge of this rabble band of goblins and Uruk-hai? He did not expect that Noglash or Durzlip would take a move like that lying down, but Warrung did not seem as aggressive as either of them, and he would be a good Orc to have on Grishnákh’s side when the time came to pick up the trail of the two escaped Halflings.

Oh dear me no, Grishnákh had not forgotten about the Halflings. He did not know how he was going to accomplish it, but somehow he was going to find his way back to Fangorn and resume the task of finding them once more. _If_ they had survived Fangorn, he would drag them squeaking and squealing back to Mordor…and if dead, he would retrieve the Precious Thing they carried.

Feeling an unexpected heat from the token around his neck, Grishnákh clutched at it desperately, trying to draw on the strength it offered before it died again. These moments, since they had come to this place, had grown fewer and fewer, as if he had lost the connection that the token had given him to his Master, and that connection only returned in sporadic fits and starts. It seemed most likely to flicker to life when he thought of the Halflings, and Grishnákh knew why. The Halflings were the Key.

The Halflings were the reason his Master had brought him Back.

-.-.-.-

“It’s a nice day, isn’t it, Eeyore,” said Piglet.

“Is it,” said Eeyore as he wandered up to rejoin them in front of the beech tree.

“Your…your patches are very nice.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said the donkey. “I Can’t See on that side.” Kanga had made some helpful attempts to show him through the use of a little table mirror in Owl’s house, but since Eeyore couldn’t see out of his eye on the side where he had been burnt most badly, he had not paid her much attention. After a while she had given up on the mirror and only told him what she was doing instead.

Piglet looked at Pooh helplessly. “Perhaps,” said Pooh, “when there is more time, and if you don’t mind sitting for a while, I might draw your portrait, Eeyore. And then you could see how it looks.”

Eeyore didn’t say anything. Ambling up alongside of Rabbit, he plopped back on his bottom and looked sidelong out of his good eye.

Rabbit returned Eeyore’s gaze very briefly before turning his head and looking back toward the forest again. “Are Roo and Tigger still in the house?” he asked Eeyore.

“Yes, and Kanga is making sure they stay there, until we see how things turn out.”

“It’s going to work,” Rabbit told him, although it sounded as if he were saying it to convince himself. “It is.”

“Let’s _try_ and keep an Open Mind now, Rabbit,” said Eeyore. “After all, it could go Terribly Horribly Wrong.”

“I think I see someone up ahead,” said Owl.

-.-.-.-

There was the beech, and there were the animals waiting for them. Rabbit and the…donkey…were the foremost. Behind the Uruk-hai, the goblins poked at each other and pointed and craned their heads for a better look. Before, the donkey’s body had been a uniform gray, but now he was patched in a panoply of colors alternating unnaturally across his face and shoulders and back. The goblins found him a creepy and impressive sight, and even Noglash was somewhat unnerved.

Outside of the donkey, there was nothing frightening or intimidating about the little group waiting to receive them. Rabbit, who was standing beside the donkey, looked defiant but small, as did the bear and Piglet behind them. The owl was very big for an owl, certainly – nearly as big as one of the goblins – but at the end of the day that was all it was: a strange sort of overly large bird. Its sharp hooked beak might be dangerous at close quarters, but it was doubtful that any of them would need to get that near. The Uruk-hai had a long reach, and they carried swords.

Mauhúr stopped at a distance of five feet from them, and the other Orcs stopped behind him. His hand was resting on the pommel of his sword, but he had not yet drawn steel. “You called us,” he said, looking at Rabbit. “Here we are.”

Obvious enough who the leader of this ragtag little group was. The donkey didn’t even seem to be paying attention and was just looking vaguely past them. Rabbit, in contrast, looked directly at Mauhúr.

“Yes,” said Rabbit simply. “Thank you for coming. We invited you here because we want you to sit down and talk with us. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

Mauhúr gave a small close-lipped smile. “Well now,” he said. “That’s very commendable of you, little rabbit. And I promise you, none of us will hurt you so long as you are cooperative.”

“You mistake me,” said Rabbit, lifting his head up a little. “We aren’t worried about you hurting us.”

“Oh, _what_?” said Noglash acidly from Mauhúr’s side. “I suppose you think you little runts are going to hurt _us_!”

Rabbit’s whiskers twitched, but it was the donkey who replied. “No,” he said in his flat voice, “but they might.”

Noglash turned with a snarl that died in his throat, as the Orcs found themselves flanked by an inland sea.

Rabbits and hares, their ears erect and pointed as spears. Squirrels with bristling tails and agitated yellow teeth. Foxes and badgers, stoats and hedgehogs, toads and tortoises, mice and shrews. Even the lowest creeping things had turned out. Mauhúr saw the brittle shells of beetles among the assembled forest creatures.

Of course they had contemplated the possibility of a small-scale ambush or attack, but this was beyond anything they could have imagined or prepared for. The entire Wood had arrived and was confronting them here, at Owl’s front door.

“Er,” said Warrung. “Captain…”

Noglash swallowed.

“You see,” said Rabbit softly, “I have an awful lot of friends-and-relations.”


	20. In Which Talks Are Held, and Mauhúr Has Tea.

“Those aren’t really all Rabbit’s friends-and-relations, are they, Pooh?” Piglet asked Pooh in a whisper afterward.

“Not all of them,” said Pooh. “Or I don’t think so, anyway. Some of them are friends-and-relations of Rabbit’s friends-and-relations, and a few of their neighbors too. Rabbit told Owl to ask Everybody, so that’s what he did.”

“I may have had some help,” Owl put in modestly. “I asked some thrushes and a yellowhammer or two to spread word of the business as I went – and there’s that daft old cuckoo who summers east of the Chestnuts. She’ll talk to anybody.”

“People already wanted to do something because of the Missages,” said Pooh. “Rabbit told me his little cousins came back this morning to ask what was being done.”

So that was it, Piglet reflected. Everyone had been prepared to do _something_ , really. All they had needed was to be told a place and a time. “What do you think we should do with…these?” he asked.

They looked down at the swords that had been laid in the grass.

“I expect we can leave them where they are,” said Pooh. “We can probably just give them back afterward. They do belong to them, after all.”

“Shouldn’t we move them, though, so that no one gets cut? I don’t like to think of Roo or Tigger or Rabbit’s little cousins playing with one.”

“Rabbit?” Pooh called. “What should we do with their swords?”

Rabbit, who was standing in tense discussion with Mauhúr, looked over somewhat distractedly. “What’s that?”

“Piglet wants to know what we should do with these swords. So that nobody hurts themselves.”

Deeply conscious of Mauhúr’s gaze upon him and the need to sound appropriately take-charge, Rabbit spoke with briskly Rabbit-like authority: “Pull them off to the side somewhere and Stand Guard over them.”

“So we’ll pull them off to the side and guard them,” said Pooh, turning to Piglet. “Now mind you take hold of the handle part, Piglet…”

Together they moved the little cache to the side of the beech tree, and to be extra careful that they were all accounted for, Piglet kept a careful inventory of every weapon handled: five swords and fourteen knives of varying shapes and sizes. Grishnákh had been particularly reluctant to lay his down, but the close gaze of some unamused squirrels had put him to rights. In addition to knives, the goblins also carried a goodly quantity of small throwing stones and – most surprisingly – a collection of jacks and marbles, which startled Pooh when he saw them.

“Where did you get these from?” he had asked with unusual sternness, and the goblins confessed that they came from the big oak tree on the other side of the forest. 

“Those we won’t give back,” Pooh told Piglet as they maintained a no-nonsense guard over the surrendered weaponry. “They belong to Christopher Robin.”

Piglet said nothing in response, but nodded. It was unlikely that Christopher Robin would ever come back for them, but some things are sacred.

Talks were still going on between Rabbit and Mauhúr. _Rabbit does talk a lot_ , Piglet thought, but he supposed that it was just as well. Certainly Rabbit carried himself with more confidence than Piglet would have done under the circumstances. As Piglet watched, Rabbit left off talking to Mauhúr to call Owl over to join him, and then Mauhúr gestured for the big Orc Warrung as a Second of his own, and so now there were two for the Hundred Acre Wood and two for the Orcs, the four of them all buried together in Close Discussion. 

The other six Orcs were in a tense little knot under the supervision of Eeyore and a thick detail of Woodlanders. From time to time Piglet looked over at Reznib, but the goblin never looked back at him. If he had, Piglet wasn’t sure what he would have done. Waving seemed inappropriate just then, but he might at least have offered Reznib a reassuring nod. The opportunity hadn’t presented itself, though: the goblin’s attention seemed to be just for his fellow prisoners, or for the animals immediately guarding them. He looked like Shagrub and Jashit did, miserable and hunched in on himself. 

It was strange, because Reznib was bigger than Piglet was, but at that moment he only looked small and frightened. Piglet felt badly for him. He couldn’t help imagining himself in Reznib’s place, perhaps because Reznib was still wearing Piglet’s scarf. 

Rabbit said something that made Mauhúr nod, and Rabbit nodded as well and took a step back, not as if he was retreating but as if something had been decided. Owl and Warrung went over to talk to the rest of the Orcs, and then Eeyore parted from the watching animals and wandered over to join Piglet and Pooh.

“What’s happening, Eeyore?” Pooh asked.

“Well,” said Eeyore in an unreadable voice. “I said there’d be Orcs in the parlor soon, didn’t I.”

-.-.-.-

Owl was fussing. This was understandable at several levels. On one level, he was the most scrupulous of hosts and wanted very much to make Visitors, whoever they might be, comfortable in his home. On another level, this was a peculiarly unusual visit, involving delicate negotations between Rabbit and the very tall leader of some captured enemy combatants. 

On a third level, though, Owl had begun to associate Visitors, any Visitors, with Trouble. 

This was a private association that predated even his most recent experience. One time, when Pooh had come to call on him, Owl had ended up losing a very handsome new bell-rope. Another time, when Pooh and Piglet were sitting in his old parlor, his entire house had toppled over. Of course on that occasion it was the wind that was the culprit, and no blame could be attached to Pooh. Nonetheless, as a bird of keen observation and intellect, Owl had noticed that when people called on him, some kind of upheaval invariably followed.

After telling both Mauhúr and Warrung to mind their heads several times when they stooped to enter his front door, he set himself to finding something for them both to sit on. Mauhúr was soon seated rather awkwardly in Owl’s armchair, while Warrung sat gingerly at the edge of another rather small chair, the legs of which bowed suspiciously under his weight. Owl talked rapidly and with almost painful attention to the comfort of his guests, worrying all the while over the fate of his furniture.

“Tea will be out shortly,” he told his guests, putting out a little table in readiness, “and then we can all attend to the business at hand.”

“Thank you, Owl,” said Rabbit.

“Now mind you let me know if you need anything – ”

“Thank you, Owl, but I think we are all quite fine for now.”

Owl opened his beak to say something but, finding Mauhúr’s gray stare upon him, shut it with an audible clack. “Well,” he said, “I shall leave yourselves to…yourselves, then.” He hurried into the next room, leaving Rabbit to deal with The Enemy.

In the wake of Owl’s incessant voice, the room was uncannily still. There was one faint creak that might have come from either of the chairs that the two Orcs were sitting on. Rabbit, who was sitting on the hearth, coughed politely. “Well then, Captain Mauhúr,” he said. “Shall we get started?”

“Your friend has left. And you’ve not brought any of your other creatures with you,” commented Mauhúr. Rabbit nodded. “You’re outnumbered now. What is to stop me from breaking your neck?”

Perhaps it should not have been an especially surprising question, but a prickle ran up Rabbit’s spine. Glancing up at the low ceiling, he kept his tone casual. “I don’t know that you would be quick enough. These quarters… They’re not very conducive to swift movement on your parts. And I am very fast – ” He lowered his gaze again to find Mauhúr eying him in apparent assessment. Rabbit felt an upwelling of weary exasperation. “Look. It wouldn’t _help_ you, killing me. I would be dead, and you would still be surrounded, and you wouldn’t have achieved a thing. Why can’t we just talk like civilized beings, instead of wasting time on silly posturing?”

He paused, and Mauhúr and Warrung tensed, at a sudden clatter in the other room. Owl pushed back through the door with a large tray laden with good porcelain and bright silverware. Tired as he was, Rabbit brightened a little. “Oh look. Here is our tea.”

“I’m afraid the sandwiches aren’t ready yet,” said Owl, setting the tray on the little table with a flustered rattle. “Kanga has told Roo and Tigger that they can spread the butter, but she insists that they aren’t to use knives because they’ll cut themselves – ”

“Whatever is she having them use instead?”

“ _Spoons_. And then she trims the crusts. Well, I certainly wouldn’t have thought of that, would you?” He looked at the Orcs, who were staring at the heavily floral crockery in front of them. “Please excuse me. There is cream if you want to add it, and you have your choice of honey or sugar. I should be out again in just a few moments…”

He disappeared into the other room again.

“Well, at least the tea is out, at any rate,” said Rabbit. He paused, looking between Owl’s delicate china and Mauhúr’s large rough hands, which rested unmoving on the Orc’s muscled thighs. Mauhúr’s face was unreadable, but Warrung looked profoundly discomfited. The knowledge came to Rabbit just then that they did not know what to do. “Presuming that you won’t break my neck, Captain,” he said gently, “I can serve you both if you’d like?” 

Receiving no answer, he stood up to pour the tea.

-.-.-.-

“How long do you think that they’ll be in there, Pooh?” asked Piglet, plucking at the grass. (Pooh and he had talked about it, and Pooh had decided that when Rabbit said to Stand Guard he did not mean they had to really stand the whole time. It was an Expression.)

“I don’t know,” said Pooh. Reflectively: “They’ll be having tea right about now, I expect. With little sandwiches, because Kanga is in there, and she makes such nice little sandwiches.”

“I hope it won’t take very long,” said Piglet, looking in the direction of the Orcs. Eeyore had wandered back over and was sitting with his backside plopped down on the ground, staring fixedly at the two tallest Orcs – _The Uruk-hai_ , thought Piglet, remembering what the goblins had called them – who were stiffly ignoring him.

“I do too. …I wonder if Kanga will keep any little sandwiches for us?”

“Pooh. She made us lunch.”

“Yes, but that was then. It’s much later now.” Pooh gazed at Owl’s front door. “All of this guarding is hard work. I think sandwiches would make it easier.”

Piglet, too anxious to be hungry or to particularly focus on Pooh’s musings, looked at the Orcs again. In marked contrast to the Uruk-hai, the Orc named Grishnákh was studying Eeyore with a coldly assessive light in his eyes. It made Piglet shiver, but if it bothered Eeyore he was giving no sign of it. His gaze never seemed to leave the Uruk-hai.

Not surprising. One of those two tallest Orcs had been the one to burn him, after all, the one called Noglash, but which one he was Piglet wasn’t sure just now. Funny, because they had been easy enough to tell apart when they were both speaking and active, but now they might as well have been waxworks, holding themselves with the same rigid defiance, eyes fixed on a middle distance somewhere over Eeyore’s head. Piget wondered if Eeyore himself knew which one was which. 

Pooh was saying something. Piglet blinked and focused on him. “What?”

“I said, I wonder if they’re hungry too. The Orcs, I mean.”

“It’s only a few hours gone since we gave them that hamper,” said Piglet.

Pooh shrugged. “They’re frightened though. My stomach always squeezes me when that happens.”

“Mine does too. Mine squeezes shut, though.” It was feeling especially squozen right now, and Piglet didn’t even have anything to be frightened about. Not on his own behalf, certainly. Perhaps these were sympathy pangs. 

_They **are** frightened, aren’t they_. It was easy enough to decipher the fear behind the rigid stoicism of the Uruk-hai, and even that Grishnákh was probably feeling some misgivings behind that cold stare of his. And the goblins… They were the worst. Without their weapons, they looked naked and afraid. 

Piglet made up his mind.

“Where are you going?” Pooh asked as Piglet got to his feet.

“Oh. I’m going to go talk to Eeyore, I think,” said Piglet, thrilled by how carelessly he said it. “Stand Guard without me, please?” He did not wait for Pooh’s response, but hurried toward Eeyore with great purpose. 

Eeyore’s back was toward him, but as he approached the donkey’s long ear flicked, and Eeyore turned his head to look at Piglet. “Is it Piglet, then? And what can I do for you?”

Piglet stopped at a little distance from him, a peculiar mix of diffident and eager. “Hullo, Eeyore. Er – ” At a questioning nod from the donkey, he drew a little closer. “I was wondering, Eeyore, if I might talk to them. The F.B.A., I mean.”

“You want to talk with them?” said Eeyore in some surprise.

“Yes, please.”

“What about, little Piglet?”

“Well…” Piglet squirmed, but went on, “I want to let them know that it’s all right. That nothing bad is going to happen. I think they’re frightened, you see.”

“You think they’re frightened?” Piglet nodded. Eeyore looked at the prisoners. Then he looked at Piglet again. “And what do you think they’re afraid of?”

“Well, of us, you know. Because we’ve captured them and all, and they don’t know what’s happening in there or what Rabbit is saying, and they’re worried, of course, about what we’re going to do with them.”

“And you want to reassure them that…it’s ‘all right’?” Piglet nodded. “ _Is_ it all right, then, do you imagine?”

“I _think_ it will be,” said Piglet. “At least, I hope so. Very much.”

“Well now,” said Eeyore wonderingly. “If it is what you want, little Piglet, then by all means. But I don’t think you should go too close to them.”

“They won’t hurt me,” said Piglet. Pointing out, sensibly enough: “They know they wouldn’t be allowed to.”

Nonetheless he kept a very polite distance from Noglash and Durzlip, and a possibly more-than-polite distance from Grishnákh, directing himself instead toward the goblins. They were standing close together in a defensive little knot, and they eyed him warily as he approached. No one had ever looked at Piglet with anything like fear before. It was not a pleasant experience, and if it hadn’t reinforced his sense of purpose he might have faltered. “Hullo,” he said in a clear firm voice. “You needn’t be afraid. It’s going to be all right.”

A snort came from the direction of the Uruk-hai. They had been standing apart from the smaller Orcs in a show of superior stoicism, but they were listening anyhow, and now one of them spoke up. “What would you know about it?” asked Durzlip resentfully. “That’s our captain they’ve got in there.”

“Rabbit is only talking to him,” Piglet explained. “That’s all. So they can decide what is to be done.”

Noglash scoffed. “********. _You’re_ not in there with them, are you? You’re out here, same as us.” 

“They might be doing anything to him in there,” said Durzlip.

Piglet shook his head. “It’s all right. You don’t know Rabbit. He doesn’t do just Anything. He Talks.”

The Uruk-hai scoffed, and Shagrub looked unconvinced, but Jashit and Reznib seemed cautiously hopeful. “So you’re not going to hurt us or nothin’?” asked Jashit hesitantly.

“No, of course not.”

“Why should we believe that, though?” asked Shagrub. “’Specially with this lot here.” He jerked his head at the circle of vigilant animals.

“They’re just Guarding. They’re not here to hurt you, they’re here to keep you from hurting anyone else.” Piglet shrugged. “Anyway, why would we want to hurt you?”

“Well.” Shagrub’s face was uncomfortable but determined. He seemed to be addressing a little patch of air somewhat up and to the right of Piglet. “I mean, there’s the chance for a bit of sport, isn’t there?”

Piglet’s stomach burbled queasily. He took Shagrub’s meaning only in a very tangential sort of way, but he did not like it. “We don’t find fun in that sort of thing. Hurting people doesn’t help anybody, and it doesn’t make us feel any better.” The sight of Shagrub’s obvious skepticism sharpened his distress. “It makes us feel worse, really, if you want to know the truth. We don’t like it.”

“But you’d be getting a bit of your own back,” said Jashit. “With one of us at least, I mean.” He couldn’t help but glance at Noglash.

The Uruk made a movement toward him. “Why you little – do you think you’ll save your skin by setting them on me?” 

Jashit shrank away. 

“He never hurt me,” Piglet interjected quickly, wanting to stave off a quarrel. “He hurt my friend. It isn’t for me to bear a grudge. It’s Eeyore’s place to…to be mad at him, or to forgive.”

Noglash looked at Piglet with some surprise. There was a pause in which no one else said anything, and into the quiet came a cough, and the rough hemming sound of someone clearing his throat. 

“Well,” said Grishnákh quietly, drawing out the word as he looked down at Piglet. “Some friend you are.”

His weapons taken from him, Grishnákh was no better armed than others, but his words cut deep. Scored by that cold judgment, Piglet was helpless to say anything, whether on his own behalf or not. All of his good intentions seemed to shrivel up and blow away. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to fade into the crowd of animals: put all possible distance between himself and Grishnákh’s malevolent gaze.

Then a second cough came from outside of the circle. “Ahem hem,” said Eeyore, wandering into their midst. He sat down and looked around at all of them indifferently, before letting his eyes rest on Grishnákh. “Piglet is a good friend, actually. A very good friend.”

Piglet swallowed and stood up straighter. He was still unable to speak, but now it was for different reasons altogether.

Grishnákh’s eyes narrowed as he studied the donkey, who only looked back at the Orc without blinking. When it seemed that Grishnákh had no reply to make to him, Eeyore said, “You’re probably all wondering what’s going to happen. I don’t know myself. In the meantime, there are sandwiches.” He paused ominously. “For those who like sandwiches.” He stood up and wandered out of the circle again.

Piglet looked at the Orcs, who had responded to Eeyore’s presence with a kind of frozen stillness, particularly the goblins, who seemed inexplicably terrified. Then he followed after Eeyore.

“There you are,” said Eeyore as Piglet emerged from the detail of animals. “And do you think your little talk did them any good?”

Piglet, saying nothing, walked over and leaned against him. Pressing his face against a bright patch of scarlet, he put his arms around Eeyore’s neck and closed his eyes. 

“…” said Eeyore.

“I hope Rabbit comes out soon,” Piglet muttered against him.

-.-.-.-

The first person out of the tree, though, was not Rabbit. It was Kanga, carrying the aforementioned sandwiches. A joyful shout came from Pooh, who did not leave his post but stood up eagerly, and Kanga nodded to Piglet. “Will you keep this topmost sandwich for Pooh?” she asked him. “It is walnut paste with honey. And here is one with Haycorns.”

“What are the others?” asked Piglet.

“Well, you should know first that these aren’t all of them,” said Kanga. “Roo and Tigger are making more in the kitchen: a big mixed plate of cucumber and watercress sandwiches with butter. But these are all tomato-cheddar, cheddar-pickle, brie and apple…”

A number of the nearest Woodlanders were listening to this list with Great Interest.

“…cream cheese with olive, egg salad, liverwurst onion, and plain paté.”

“Paté,” said Eeyore flatly.

“I didn’t know what an F.B.A. would eat,” Kanga said with a shrug. “If I’m not sure, I always make a variety. But the one who is in with Rabbit now? Captain Mauhúr? Owl said that he seemed to like it well enough.” 

“Have you heard any of what they’re talking about?” asked Piglet. “Has anything been decided yet?”

“I have been making sandwiches, so I don’t know… And now I am going to give them to the F.B.A. You’ll have to tell me which ones they are, though, Piglet: I still haven’t seen them yet.”

“What, not even Captain Mauhúr?” Piglet was surprised.

“I was in the kitchen. And it’s not polite to peek.”

So Piglet, only a few minutes after his escape, found himself going in among the Orcs again, this time with Kanga and a great platter of sandwiches.

“Oh my,” said Kanga, looking up at Durzlip and Noglash. “You are very tall. I suppose I shan’t be mistaking you for badgers after all.” Exchanging puzzled glances, they received their tomato-cheddar and liverwurst onion sandwiches from her with bemusement.

“Hello,” she said to Jashit, Shagrub and Reznib. “You must be the three that Pooh-dear gave my hamper to,” she went on – to their complete and utter horror, since the two Uruk-hai were standing right there. Kanga, not knowing that she had blown their cover or that there was any kind of cover to be blown, went on, “You are very welcome to it, but I hope that you will give back the jam jars later, if you would be so kind. I make all of my own preserves, so it would be a great kindness. Here are your sandwiches.”

They received them with low mutters of thanks, keeping their eyes fixed low so that they wouldn’t see the eyes of Durzlip and Noglash upon them. Shagrub, in a kind of ecstasy of despair, devoured his egg salad in a single gulp, and Kanga, always pleased to see people enjoying her food, gave him two more.

The last of them was Grishnákh. As they approached him Piglet had to take all of his courage in hand to keep from bolting, but Kanga was not afraid. The Mordor Orc stood head and shoulders above her, and she only looked at him and asked him kindly which sandwich he would like to eat.

Grishnákh said nothing, his long ape-like arms hanging unmoving at his sides. Eventually it became obvious that he wasn’t actually going to say anything, and the silence became strange and awkward. Kanga was nonplussed, but not for long. “That settles it, then,” she said in her firm pleasant voice. “ _You_ shall have the sour pickle.”

A hysterical laugh came from one of the goblins – Jashit, Piglet thought it was. He nearly giggled as well, but managed to keep it in. A few stubborn beats passed before Grishnákh took his sandwich.

“And now that we have fed our guests, sandwiches for the rest of you as well,” said Kanga, looking around the circle of animals. “Take the rest of the platter round, Piglet darling, and then we’ll go and get the other one.”

“Your ‘guests,’” repeated Grishnákh sardonically. “You mean prisoners, of course.” The sandwich he had taken dangled from his hand. 

Kanga shook her head. “No…I don’t think I like that word, ‘prisoners.’ It sounds like little boys playing a game. No, I shall call you my guests. And when you eat that sandwich you shall have another.”

She looked at him expectantly. Gazing back at her with hooded eyes, Grishnákh bit the corner off his sandwich.


	21. In Which Talks Are Concluded, and Owl Gets Back His Sitting Room.

“It’s not fair, Owl,” complained Roo.  “Mummy said that we would be able to see the F.B.A., and there are two of them in there with Rabbit right now, and it is ever so much more than past four o’clock, and Tigger and I have been quiet as mice.”

“Mmm-MMF,” said Tigger. He was eating his fourth Extract of Malt sandwich, but his meaning was quite unmistakable. 

Certainly Owl, indisputably the wisest animal in the Hundred Acre Wood, could not have mistaken it, and he responded with sagacious equanimity:  “My dear fellows, you must understand these things take time.  Why, in the First Boer War Sir Evelyn Wood signed the armistice to end the war on 6 March 1881 and the peace treaty wasn't signed until 23 March, seventeen days later.  And the final peace treaty, the Pretoria Convention, wasn't signed until 3 August of that year, and then it _still_ had to be ratified on 25 October by the Transvaal Volksraad.  So you see, you cannot rush these things.”

“Do you mean Rabbit and those Orcs have to stay in your sitting room until October?” squeaked Roo.

“Well…hopefully not that long,” said Owl, looking worried all of a sudden.

Roo looked at Tigger with dismay.  “It isn’t fair!” he cried again.  “Mummy is bound to make us go to bed before then.”

“She’ll make us go to bed at least three or four times,” said Tigger, who had swallowed the last of his sandwich.  “At Least.”

“Can’t we even peek out at them?” Roo asked Owl beseechingly.

“Quite out of the question, I am afraid,” said Owl with Deep Regret.  “I have it on your mother’s authority that she considers peeking to be very rude indeed, so in her absence I am bound to respect her parental beliefs.  But you can make more sandwiches if you like.  To be perfectly frank, I don’t think two platters will be enough to feed all of the animals who have gathered outside…”

He went into the other room to see how things were getting along between Rabbit and Captain Mauhúr, and to try and gage whether he would be getting his sitting room back some time before the end of the month, and Roo looked at Tigger with great determination on his small face.

“Tigger,” he said, “I think we should sneak into the other room.  Mummy is not here to stop us, and Owl has gone out of it now.  If we sneak through the door very quiet and careful, no one will notice.”

“Quiet and careful,” announced Tigger with relish, “is what Tiggers do best.”

-.-.-.-

They weren’t at the peace treaty yet, but they had moved beyond sandwiches at any rate, so on those grounds Sir Evelyn would likely have called it a successful armistice.  The plates stood empty of all but the tiniest crumbs, and the tea pot stood nearly empty, with the little tea remaining gone cold.  Had Kanga been there to see she would have been immensely pleased, and then she would have chided Owl for not making another kettle.  But Kanga was out feeding the troops, and Owl was silent, listening with Rabbit to Captain Mauhúr’s tale.  Mauhúr had begun the account of his travels at Rabbit’s behest, for Rabbit badly wanted to understand the Orcs and their objectives, and he had started to realize that this was of a piece with where they came from and what was happening there.

Christopher Robin’s old books of history and geography had talked about countries like Brazil and Africa and places like that, but Rabbit could not recall that they said anything about Orthanc or Isengard, or the Westemnet or Fangorn Wood or any of the other places that Mauhúr described.  The people sounded strange too.  Mauhúr spoke often of his master, who was called many names: The White Wizard, the Hand of Isengard, Sharkey, Saruman.  Christopher Robin had told them many wonderful tales about Witches and Wizards, and so that at least was not wholly unprecedented, but there wasn’t much else familiar about what Mauhúr was telling him. 

In Orthanc Mauhúr and the other Uruk-hai had been given orders by their master to find Halflings: little people like Men, but much shorter, with curly hair on their heads and the tops of their feet.  They carried something that their Master wanted, “for the war” as Warrung put it, and so Saruman had sent his fiercest servants to retrieve it for him. 

What war? asked Rabbit.

War was brewing in Middle-earth.  Great Powers were stirring, and the creatures who served those Powers were all in motion: the Men, the Elves, the Wizards, Trolls, and Orcs.  There were many Orcs, of whom the greatest were the Uruk-hai in the service of Saruman, and there were other Orcs, who served the Dark Lord of Mordor, and of course the smallest Orcs, the goblins of the Misty Mountains and outlying forests, who served mostly their own petty interests. 

Several bands of Orcs across these various party lines had come together to form a bigger party, which had captured two Halfling prisoners and carried them as far across the Westemnet as the edge of Fangorn Forest.  But there had been a battle there with mounted Men, and many Orcs had died.  Mauhúr, whose job was to reinforce the Uruk-hai returning to Isengard, had lost most of his best warriors in the battle, and when he saw that the fight was hopeless he had faded back toward Fangorn.

He and some of the other Orcs that escaped into Fangorn decided to go through the forest and return to Isengard with news of the disaster, but Fangorn Forest was profoundly inhospitable to Orcs and to all who entered there.  More Orcs had been lost, slain by the hostile trees.  Only Mauhúr and the seven Orcs who were with him now had survived, but as they fled from the rage of Fangorn, Something Happened, and they had found themselves in another place entirely.  And everything since then, as Mauhúr said, Rabbit knew already.

There was a clicking sound and Rabbit glanced toward the door that led into Owl’s little kitchen, but it was closed, and there was no one there. 

“I’ll just put these things away,” said Owl, seeing Rabbit look, “and go and get more tea.”

“Oh, very good, Owl,” said Rabbit.  “I would be glad of another cup.”  He was not sure that he wanted anything more to drink, really, but at least it would give him something to do with his paws.  Pouring the tea.  Adding cream and sugar.  Offering Mauhúr and Warrung more tea as well.  Rabbit would be very glad of those distractions at the moment.  It felt like his head was spinning with all that Mauhúr had said.

As Owl went back into the kitchen, Rabbit looked at the Orc…Uruk…captain again.  He knew that he might, at that moment, try playing at knowing more than he did.  Rabbit liked being In The Know, and he liked for everyone else to think that he was In The Know as well.  But he also knew that the stakes were high, both for himself and for Captain Mauhúr.  Under the circumstances, honesty was the best, the only, policy.

“Everything that you have told me is very strange,” he said.  “As I think I’ve told you before, we don’t know about any of the places you have mentioned, but there are books that we might try to consult.  I don’t know how much hope I can give you, but we can certainly try.”

“You have Books of Lore?” asked Mauhúr.

“We have school books that used to belong to Christopher Robin, so… Yes, I think those should count,” said Rabbit.

“I cannot read,” said the Uruk, “and I do not know that any of those with me can either, beyond our own names or the image-sigils for them.

“We’ll read them for you,” said Rabbit.  “At least, we _might_ read them for you.  Before that happens, we’ll have to come to some arrangement of terms for you and your men – your Orcs,” he corrected, seeing Mauhúr’s face, “to abide by.  You can’t do the kinds of things you were doing before, not while you are staying here, however long or short a stay that may be.  Even if it’s only temporary, there are going to have to be some rules.”

“Name these rules,” said Mauhúr coldly.

“Well, no burning people would be good for starters,” said Rabbit.  “Or hurting or killing them,” he added, thinking that _No burning_ was perhaps a trifle limited in scope.  “In fact, I think a general policy of minimal or no discomfort caused to others would be a sound one, for all parties concerned.

“Second, you must make your camp for the next few nights in a place of our choosing.  We want to know your whereabouts, and we want you to be somewhere that it is easy for us to see.  Frankly, the woods are more convenient for us.”  Rabbit also didn’t want them spending another night in Christopher Robin’s old house, but he decided it would be better not to touch on this point, or to try and explain the sensibilities that the Orcs had injured by staying there.  The reasons he had given, he thought, were both sensible and self-explanatory.

Mauhúr glanced at Warrung, then nodded at Rabbit.  “Go on.”

“Thirdly…you must be prepared to accept that there will be more rules than this.”  Mauhúr growled a little, and Rabbit went on in his firmest voice:  “Captain Mauhúr, you and I are only two people, and we cannot think that one talk over tea is going to cover everything.  I am bound to think of other considerations after the fact, as are my friends, so it is only fair that I warn you.  If they really are completely impossible for you – the rules, I mean – then we can talk about them.  But you must at least be willing to have the conversation.

“And fourth… I ask for honesty, and transparency.  The better I can understand you and your own needs, the better I can help you, and of course we will do our best to be open and honest with you in return.”

“By honest do you mean we should expect more tricks like this afternoon?” asked Mauhúr.

“We didn’t really trick you,” said Rabbit.  “We just misled you a bit.”  Shifting a little uncomfortably in place.  “We are very truthful for the most part, really.”

Mauhúr’s smile showed a disconcerting number of teeth.  “Clever Rabbit.  I think you are more familiar with trickery and subterfuge than you let on.”

Rabbit gave him a wary look, but Mauhúr did not seem angry.  Perhaps this was an Orc’s idea of praise. 

“I want to know more about the place you spoke of,” said Mauhúr.  “Where we are to sleep.  Have you chosen it already, or do you mean to discuss it with your small friends?”

“I do have a place in mind,” Rabbit admitted, “but the person I really need to clear it with is Owl.  It isn’t here,” he said quickly, seeing the dubious looks that Mauhúr and Warrung were casting around them.  “It only touches on Owl in a little way, really, and I don’t think he is likely to object.  But he is in the kitchen, so we will have to – “

“They’re gone!” said Owl, coming through the kitchen door again.  He looked very upset.  “They’re not there!”

“Who’s gone?” asked Rabbit.

“Roo and Tigger,” said Owl.  “They’re not in the kitchen: I looked everywhere.  And they didn’t go outside – I have already called around out the back.”

“Outside is a very big place,” said Rabbit sternly.

“But nobody has seen them, Rabbit!  And if they aren’t in the kitchen, and they didn’t go outside, then…” 

“Excuse me,” said Rabbit to Mauhúr and Warrung, and he got up and went to Owl.  “Does Kanga know that they are missing?” he asked quietly.

“She is looking around the kitchen.  I told her that I already looked there, but she is doing it anyway.”

“This is a problem.  If they aren’t there and they didn’t go outside…”  Rabbit turned and looked at the Uruk-hai.  They were not looking at him but in the direction of Owl’s antique hutch cabinet, which stood rather to the right of Owl’s kitchen door.  The bottom was too far off the ground for anyone hide under it, not without being seen, but one of the two front doors was slightly ajar, and the tip of something orange and black and stripey protruded from within.

Owl immediately opened the hutch to reveal the two Missing Persons blinking out at him.

“You said that quiet and careful is what Tiggers do best,” Roo addressed Tigger reproachfully.

“They also like to breathe,” Tigger informed him.

“Come out of there right now,” huffed Owl, who had gone from worried to very cross indeed.  “You have caused a great deal of trouble.  What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“We wanted to see the Orcs,” said Roo as he clambered forward out of the hutch.  “Those are them, aren’t they?  Oo!  They are very tall!  I can jump VERY tall, but not so tall as that.”  He jumped perhaps a foot in the air to demonstrate, which, given Roo’s size, was actually very impressive, and then he did it again for good measure.  “I’ll bet that even Tiggers can’t bounce so high!”

“Can.  But they don’t want to just now,” said Tigger.

“They probably can’t jump very high themselves though, Orcs can’t, on account of they’re already so big.  Elephants are big, and they can’t jump.  They have to have at least one foot on the ground all the time.  That’s what Christopher Robin said.  Also giraffes don’t make any sounds.  And flamingos can only eat with their heads upside down!”

“I tried to do that once,” said Tigger.  “It doesn’t work with soup.”

“Go in the kitchen at once,” Rabbit ordered.  “Your mother is very worried!”  Owl chivvied Roo through the door.

Tigger, not the sort of person who could be chivvied anywhere, followed behind at a nonchalant pace, tail swaying unconcernedly.  He paused in the doorway, looking back at the Orcs.  “Honeybees have hair on their eyes,” he said, and sauntered through. 

The kitchen door swung shut, hiding them from further sight.

“Right,” said Rabbit.  “Well, that’s – ”  He paused, unable to remember what he had been saying before Owl came had come into the room.  Mauhúr was no help.  He only looked at Rabbit.

“Crows makes false nests to fool predators.”

Rabbit and Mauhúr both looked at Warrung, who shrugged.  “Took me a moment to remember,” he said.

-.-.-.-

Piglet and Pooh were sitting and contentedly munching the sandwiches that Kanga had given them earlier, while she, Roo, Tigger and Eeyore sat or stood nearby in the grass.  That is, except for Roo, who was sitting in her pocket and who was, it must be confessed, in a bit of a pet.  Roo was very tired of his mother’s pocket, but Kanga was being Firm with him.  He had been terribly naughty, disobeying hers and Owl’s instructions, and she was going to give him and Tigger both a stern talking-to when they got home.  In the meantime, Tigger was to remain close by where she could see, and Roo was to stay right where she could be most certain of finding him.

“But Mummy, Owl said that they would be in there until October.  Tigger and me just couldn’t wait that long.”

“‘Tigger and I,’ dear,” she corrected him absently.

“They’re going to be in there till _when_?” exclaimed Piglet, and even Eeyore, who had seemed in his Eeyorish way to not be paying much attention to anything at all, lifted his head with a look of surprise.

“October is a long way off, isn’t it?” said Pooh, and he gave an uneasy look at the sharp Orkish swords and knives that he and Piglet were guarding.  If he and Piglet were really going to have to guard them until October, it might be good to find some more volunteers to trade off with them.  Lifting his head, he regarded the general mass of Rabbit’s friends and relations thoughtfully.

Their concerns were rendered moot as the front door of the venerable old beech tree opened, and Rabbit and Owl came out of it.  Mauhúr and Warrung followed behind, rather more cautiously, as they stooped to avoid thumping their heads on the lintel.  An anticipatory little murmur began like the quiet sussuration of wind in the trees, starting up gradually out of nowhere before dying again as everyone went quiet, listening.  Rabbit began to speak.

Usually when Rabbit spoke to a crowd he would bring notes or other Aides To Memory so that he would be able to remember what he was talking about, but he must not have liked to take notes during his conversation with the two Orcs, because this time he wasn’t carrying anything.  Consequently, as he was speaking without looking down or bringing bits of paper up to his face after his usual practice, his voice carried clearly enough that everyone in the clearing could hear him. 

“I am happy to tell you all that I have talked to Captain Mauhúr and we have arrived at a satisfactory agreement on the correct conduct for himself and the rest of the F.B.A., hereafter to be known and referred to as the Orcs while they are in our Wood.  For the immediate future, they will be staying at Owl’s old residence, the Chestnuts, where they will be supervised for as long as it is deemed necessary or for as long as they happen to stay here at all, whichever is shorter.  These are the terms that we have come to over the course of our discussion…”

The news, Piglet decided as he listened, was good, but he looked around him at the others to see how they reacted.  Kanga looked calm and politely interested, and Roo and Tigger’s faces moved through the usual pattern of great eagerness yielding to declining interest and finally excessive boredom.  Pooh certainly _looked_ as though he was listening, but Pooh generally looked like he was listening when Rabbit was speaking, until you talked to him and found out that he had been thinking the whole time about something else.  Piglet resolved to listen extra hard on Pooh’s behalf as well as his own, because This Was Important.

But Eeyore?  Eeyore’s face showed nothing at all, and as Piglet looked at him he wondered what Eeyore was thinking and if he was glad, or mad, or sad about the Terms that Rabbit had just stated: if he felt that they were enough or if he felt that they were insufficient, or if he even felt anything at all.

“Does anyone have any questions?” asked Rabbit.

Surrounded by the company of Woodlanders guarding them, the Orcs had been listening very closely to everything that Rabbit had to say.  This was no mean feat, because they didn’t even know all of the words that he was using, and it was very easy to lose the thread of his meaning in and around the many parentheticals.  They gave it their best: nonetheless, as Shagrub muttered, he hoped that Mauhúr would be able to translate what had been said in terms that the average fellow could understand.

When Rabbit enumerated his first term Jashit’s ears perked up.  Reznib and Shagrub noticed and looked at him curiously, but Jashit made an abortive movement with his hand that discouraged any whispered questions.  After a few minutes the speechifying drifted to a close.  When Rabbit asked if anyone had any questions, Jashit raised his hand. 

“Yes?” called Rabbit, nodding to him.

“Who are we answerable to?” Jashit called.  “That is to say, who do we take orders from?  Do we go through Mauhúr or do we go through you?”

Rabbit, surprised by the question, nonetheless made a bid at answering it.  “I…it makes sense that you would go through Captain Mauhúr, I think.  After all – he is your captain.”

“But then he takes his orders from you?”

“Not exactly.  That is, if something is needful, he should petition me as a spokesman for the Woodlanders.  But our authority is as a body, not as any one person.”

“But you’re the one he talks to, if something comes,” said Jashit.  “So they’re _your_ rules, right?”

“Yes,” said Rabbit.  “Subject to change but yes.  These first rules have come from me, after some consultation with Owl.” 

(Actually Owl had been in the kitchen when Rabbit was promulgating them, but he had approved them immediately once Rabbit and he were able to discuss it.  Then he had started making a long list of suggestions for rules five, six, and so forth, which Rabbit quickly curtailed by suggesting that he take them down as notes for when next they were able to convene with Pooh, Piglet, Kanga and so on.  Rabbit had learned over time how Owl was best managed, and when he had to write his thoughts down he was much easier to hold in check.)

“All right,” said Jashit, and he put his hand down.

“Was that your whole question?” Rabbit called, craning his head a little.

Jashit nodded, not realizing that it was harder for Rabbit to see this from where he was standing.  Reznib gave him a quick nudge.  “Yes, that was my question,” said Jashit.

“Anyone else?” asked Rabbit.

This time it was one of the tall Uruk-hai who, following Jashit’s example, raised his hand.  “What are we going to do for food?” called Durzlip.  “These sandwiches that you’re giving us are all well and good, but what about when you lot get tired of feeding us?”

“So long as you are here, we will continue to feed you,” said Rabbit.  “That is enough for now.  If you want to reciprocate by doing some helpful thing for us in return, then that speaks to your own good character and is to be commended.”

“What about meat?” demanded Noglash, not bothering to raise his hand.  His eyes flashed as he looked at Rabbit and then around him at the surrounding animals.  “We are the fighting Uruk-hai!  We eat flesh!”

“You are not fighting now,” said Rabbit flatly.  “You will have to expand your palates.”

“I have a jar of pickled herring at home,” volunteered Kanga.  “And there is always more paté.”

Noglash looked like he was going to say something rude, but catching a look from Mauhúr, he subsided.

(“You did like that liverwurst and onion,” Durzlip reminded him.

“Not the ******* point,” snapped Noglash.)

“Is there anything else?” asked Rabbit.  When none were forthcoming, he said, “I’m sure that many of you have more questions even so, but you can ask me them later whenever you like.  Now, though, it is getting on to dusk, so we will take advantage of what light is left to us.” 

It was time for them to adjourn to the Chestnuts.

-.-.-.-

Owl’s old house was still much as it had been left on the day Owl, vacating the premises with his sundry belongings, took up residence in Piglet’s former home instead.  Although there were those animals who might have moved into the Chestnuts in his absence or used bits of it to form new homes of their own, they had all been too polite to do so, and the structure of the actual house portion remained vacant and comparatively intact (so long as people watched out for the splintery bits) between the same boughs that had once borne it aloft.  This rough shelter was quickly claimed by the three smallest Orcs, with no contest from the Uruk-hai, who were all too big to enter. 

As for the Uruk-hai, they were rigging up a makeshift tent for themselves with some tarp and line that had been given to them, using the trunk and projecting limbs of the fallen tree to form a support wall and beams.  They mostly ignored the many animals that sat or sprawled in the grass or perched in the neighboring trees to watch them, although from time to time Noglash made a flourishing gesture with one of his fingers in apparent acknowledgment.

“I say,” said Owl, who was proud to have contributed real estate to the venture.  “They are making capital use of the materials given them.”

“I’m worried, Owl,” said Rabbit quietly as he watched the efficiency of the Uruk-hai.  They were standing some distance away, where there was no danger of being overheard.  “You were there for most of what Captain Mauhúr told me, I think, about where the Orcs came from and about what they were doing when they were there.  Fighting and kidnapping and weapons and war… These are a very hardened people, and not very nice.  Is it right to help them, do you think?  I mean: is it right?  For us to help them find their way home, where they were doing all of those not-good things, only so they can go right back to doing them?” 

This was a halting and uncharacteristic speech for Rabbit, who did not like to show his doubts before others.  Owl, sensible that he was receiving a private confidence and humbled, decided to err on the side of open-minded optimism.  “We don’t really know everything about where they came from, Rabbit, or what it all means.  It is likely there are dynamics at work that we simply don’t understand.  Certainly the Captain does not paint a very flattering or romantic picture of their activities – but that may also come of having a military mind, and a disinterest in self-flattery.”

“I don’t like the sound of their wizard,” said Rabbit, almost to himself, “or this Dark Lord Sauron, that they mentioned.  And even forgetting all of that for a moment, and for all that they have yielded, they are so very fierce…”

“They are soldiers.  Intimidation is a desirable trait in arenas of combat,” said Owl.  “Consider the battle cry of the Gurkhas, or the Maori Haka… And you see that, for all his fierceness, the Captain seems open to reason.  He never shouted at you during your conference with him, and he agreed to all of the terms that you gave him.”

“That’s true.”

“You did wisely by having him and his men here, Rabbit, where we can better watch them and where they have some opportunity to prove themselves better than they have been.  It has placed them on a parole of sorts.  Effectively, you are giving them another chance.  By their deeds shall we know them.”

“We’ve seen some of those deeds already,” muttered Rabbit.  “But you’re right, Owl.  This is a fresh start we’re giving them.  I need to remember that.”

“In any event, certainly it is in our own interests to help them, just as it is in their best interests to let us help them,” said Owl.  “After all.  They can’t stay here forever.”


	22. In Which Jashit Holds Forth.

“We can’t stay here forever, Captain,” growled Noglash, driving the corner of their tent down with a wood stake.  “I’m apt to pop a head off one of these creatures, and never mind the consequences.”

“You’ll hold yourself in check for now, Noglash.  I sat with their leader for some time, and he is neither as foolish nor as timid as we thought he was.  If we obey the terms that they have set for us and do not offer any further violence, he has said that he will do what he can to help us.  I am taking him at his word.  I think his promises are good, and that he will do what he can to find whatever information can be found to help us.”

Noglash remained skeptical.  “You mean these books he was talking about?  _Skai_.  What good are books, unless you’re a wizard and it’s a book of spells?  Now if this Rabbit can conjure up a dragon or some sort of magical wind to take us home, I’d be all for it…”

“A map is more likely than either of those,” said Mauhúr dryly.  “And personally, a map is what I am hoping for.  I am more willing to trust a map than magical wind.”

“I don’t know about that, Captain,” said Durzlip.  “If we could harness the power of Noglash’s wind, all our troubles would be over.” 

Noglash turned to look at his friend with an expression of slow incredulity. 

Durzlip looked back at him, his face remarkably impassive.  “Hear my words, Noglash.  You know they’re true.  If your wind was magic we would be half way to Isengard.”

“There are only two kinds of joke that you can be making right now, and both of them are at my expense,” growled Noglash.  “You’re a good mate normally, so I am not going to kill you.  But I’m _not_ in the mood.”  He looked back at Mauhúr.  “I have said what I think.  I do not challenge you.  You are my Captain, and you have spoken.  I will do what you say.” 

Noglash’s delivery was curt, but they all knew he meant it.  Noglash was many things – mighty warrior, rash speaker, but never a leader or someone who desired leadership, and capable of great loyalty to one who had earned it.  He might be concerned about Mauhúr’s course of action, but he would not go against it.

Mauhúr nodded.  “I have heard you.”

“Now what about the snaga Orcs?” growled Noglash, changing tacks so suddenly that it nearly gave them all whiplash.

Mauhúr blinked.  “What about the snaga Orcs?”

-.-.-.-

“It’s a total _wreck_!” said Shagrub, looking around him.  All within the fallen house was dust and splintered wood.  It did not rest evenly on its side, and consequently the floor slanted dramatically beneath his splayed feet.  Once long ago, the floor had been a wall, and the ceiling another wall, with a front door in it.  The door was still there, and because it opened inward, it currently dangled above their heads.  Like an accident waiting to happen, Shagrub would have said, except that it hadn’t waited.  He had already hit his head twice.

“Better keep our boots on while we’re in here,” said Jashit.  “Splinters everywhere.”

“Maybe if we ask they’ll give us something to put on the floor,” said Reznib, but he looked around him uneasily.  There were long slivers of wood peeling out from the walls as well.  He rubbed his arms uncomfortably.  “Perhaps a knife to cut those away so we don’t get ’em anywhere higher up either…”

“They aren’t gonna give us a knife,” said Shagrub.  “They took everything sharp or pointy of ours, remember?”

Reznib shrugged.  “Couldn’t hurt to ask.”

Shagrub did not share this opinion.  In his experience it jolly well could.  He certainly remembered any number of times he had been popped in the mouth or suffered some other unpleasant consequence, asking the wrong kind of question.  He had learned to think carefully before voicing his thoughts.  More times than not, if he thought about it, he could work out some kind of answer on his own.  And maybe, if he was careful, he could find something to serve him for a makeshift knife.  Thoughtfully he broke of one of the thinner spars of wood sticking out of the wall.

“What’re you doing with that?” asked Reznib.

“Oh…nothing,” said Shagrub, testing the point with his finger.  That should have been enough, but Reznib was still looking at him.  Shagrub narrowed his eyes.  “What do you think?  It’s a shiv, that’s what it is.”

Reznib looked pained.

“I just don’t like not having something pointy on hand,” said Shagrub.  He felt himself over, looking for a place to secure it where it wouldn’t poke him.

“I think they’re going to give back our actual knives if we’re good,” said Reznib.

The other Orc scoffed at this.  “Oo, ‘If we’re _gooood_ …’  _Sha_.  I think _you_ should take that scarf off.  It’s stopped the blood getting to your brain.”

There was a sudden hard pounding from outside.  Dust fell from the wall/ceiling of the house, and Reznib sneezed, while Jashit and Shagrub both swore as the dust got in their eyes.  “Hey in there.  You little pustules had better get out here if you know what’s good for you,” Durzlip barked from outside.

“What an invitation,” said Shagrub sardonically.  To Reznib: “And you wanted to be good…”

“Hold up, boys,” said Jashit.  “I think I’ve got a bead on this.”  He went over to the wall and smote it back.  “What for?” he shouted through the wood.  “What do you want?”

There was silence on the other side of the wall, and a shuffling of bodies.

Reznib coughed.  “I’m not sure if they heard y—”

“With all due respect, the _Captain_ craves the presence of your illustrious company.  Now get the fuck out here before I knock this puny wall in,” snarled Noglash.

“All right,” said Jashit under his breath, “here I go…”

“Jashit!” Reznib exclaimed in alarm, as Jashit leapt up toward the door and caught onto it.

There was a cracking sound, and then Jashit and the door, which had torn away on its hinges, hit the floor with a smash.

“Right…let me try that again,” said Jashit dizzily, as he sat up amid broken pieces of door.

“What are you little shits doing in there?!”

Horrified and fascinated at once, Reznib and Shagrub both offered up their shoulders as a disoriented but determined Jashit used them to reach the rectangular entryway above their heads.  When he had pulled himself out he thrust his arm down.  “Come on!” he said.

“We’re going to die,” muttered Shagrub, but he grabbed Jashit’s hand.

When they were all three of them standing on top of the house, Jashit went to the edge and looked down.  “You want to talk to us: well, we’re listening.”

The Uruk-hai were staring up, seeming nonplused that they had not come down by now.  Now it was Mauhúr who spoke, and unlike the angry Durzlip and furious Noglash, his voice was icy cold.  “I’m not of a mind to share my business with the whole forest, rat.  If you make me angry enough I will come up there, but I suggest that you come down now.”

“We,” said Jashit grandly, “are not coming down until you give us your word.”

“My word…?”

“Your word,” Jashit repeated, “not to hurt us or cause us unnecessary discomfort.  Per the Terms.”

“Those are between us and them,” snapped Noglash.  “They aren’t between us and you.”

“That’s not what that rabbit said.  He said minimal or no discomfort caused to others, _for all parties concerned_.  Now you may not think that is clear, but I do,” said Jashit, with a confidence that couldn’t help but delight his two fellows, though they still thought it likely that they were going to die for this prime piece of impudence. 

“That is true,” remarked Warrung, appearing to give this claim actual consideration.  “On the other hand, he also said you were to defer to the Captain here as next up in the chain of command.  And he’s giving you an order.”

“Ah, but he _ain’t_ any captain of ours, now is he?” said Jashit triumphantly.  “We didn’t come out here under Isengard’s banner.  We came to avenge our folk slain in Moria and then bugger off home again.  S’just an accident we’re here with you, and I don’t think there’s anything says that we have to listen to a word any of you say if we don’t want to.”

Amid the furious threats being uttered below, Mauhúr was silent, gazing up at Jashit.  He knew, and he knew Jashit knew, that they were not alone and that this shouted exchange was being made public to all the animals watching them.  Trying to physical dominate or injure the goblins would likely draw interference from the Woodlanders. 

“You’re Jashit, right?  The one from Mirkwood?” he said at last.

“Yeah…?”  Jashit was nervous.  It was a little unsettling to receive the kind of special attention from an Uruk that included him using your actual name.

“Well Jashit, if you come down we’ll talk, and just for this occasion, I promise that I will not hurt or kill you.”

“What about Noglash, though?  Remember about Noglash,” Reznib and Shagrub quickly reminded Jashit in whispers loud enough to be heard below.

Mauhúr started grinning.  “Not I, nor Noglash, nor Durzlip or Warrung will do you harm,” he said above the imprecations of Noglash.  “Come down.”

Reznib grabbed at Jashit’s shoulder and exaggeratedly mouthed another name.

“What about Grishnákh?” Jashit called down.

On the ground, Mauhúr looked at his fellow Uruk-hai.  Noglash and Durzlip were looking indignant at all of the demands being made, while Warrung looked unperturbed.  Grishnákh, who had done what needed doing pulling the tent together and was now sitting a little way apart from them, only gazed back at Mauhúr with his pale eyes _._   “I promise nothing for Grishnákh,” Mauhúr called up dryly.

There was a quick conference between the three goblins on top of the house.  “All right,” Jashit announced.  “We’re coming down now.”  Hopping over onto the main trunk of the downed chestnut tree, he scrambled down its rough side.

It was when Reznib and Shagrub had slithered after him that they heard Mauhúr remarking to Jashit, “Of course, I made no promises to your little friends.”  Knowing that they were already in easy grabbing distance, the two of them shot each other an anguished look.  “Bold words are best accompanied by careful thought, my small ones.  But as a token of my good will, you won’t be harmed this time either.  Now come along, into the tent.  We have things to talk about, and we’ve put on enough of a show for the creatures in this Wood.”

When they were all in the tent – the four Uruk-hai, the three goblins, and Grishnákh – Mauhúr turned to the goblins.  “And so I understand the basket you “found” earlier was not found so much as given to you, is that correct?” Mauhúr asked them.

The three of them nodded, very nearly at the same time.  They already knew that Durzlip or Noglash had finked on them.  They had known that would happen as soon as the two had some time to talk with Mauhúr.

“And how did you tell us that you came by it, originally?”

“Well, I’m not sure that you asked us, Captain Mauhúr, sir,” said a very respectful Shagrub.

“Ah, but you told Noglash and Durzlip, didn’t you?  Didn’t you mention something about finding it?  Finding it where…?”

“We said that we went back to the rabbit burrow, sir.  And we did, sir.  We just didn’t say that was where we found the hamper.”

“All right,” said Mauhúr.  “Now tell me where you did find it, and this time, try to give a full account of all that happened.  You may be surprised to hear that I actually know something of it from my talk with the rabbit earlier, but if you can try to deal with me honestly for a few moments, I’d like to hear it from you.”

Sheepishly the story came out: about the return to the abandoned rabbit burrow and their unsuccessful search inside; about the discovery of Pooh and Piglet tacking up fliers in the wood, and the decision to capture Piglet; Piglet’s capture and how he had promised to help them find food, and about the hamper they had been given.  The goblins tried to stay vague about this part of the story, and would have left out the part about their visit to Pooh’s house altogether, but Mauhúr already knew they had been to the bear’s home and left it again afterward, because Rabbit had said as much. 

Noglash and Durzlip both found the entire story outrageous.  Multiple missed opportunities, they called it, because the goblins had not been square and because they had not known how to exploit an advantage.  They could have kept the pig as a hostage rather than letting it go for only one exchange of food.  They could have borne both pig and bear back to the oak tree as captives and ensured a continuous supply from the Woodlanders in exchange for their safety.  Even if they had spared both pig and bear and come back with the hamper just as they had, they could have given an honest story of how they’d come by it, and shown the others the way to the bear’s house itself.  A quick sortie at the bear’s house would have earned all of them, Uruk and goblin alike, a fresh base of operations…with, from the sound of it, ample supplies!

But Mauhúr shook his head.  Three of their number, himself included, had spent the morning navigating the Wood.  By the time of his return to the tree, there would not have been time for any kind of sortie or raid.  Even if there had been, the outcome at the bear’s house would likely have been the same as the outcome at Owl’s, with the impossible odds of the entire Wood turning out against them.  And had any harm come to the animals, it was possible that the rabbit would not have been able to control the creatures gathered under him.  There was nothing to signify that the bear’s house could withstand the full fury of the Hundred Acre Wood.

“Not that we could have known all of this in advance,” he told the goblins, “so you don’t get off the hook altogether.  I’m going to invoke another of the rabbit’s terms here, I think, and ask that you keep honest with us from here out.  It’s much better if we share information.”

Jashit exchanged a glance with Reznib and Shagrub.  “We’re willing to keep honest with you if you’ll keep honest with us,” he told Mauhúr.

“Fair enough,” said the Uruk captain.  “Because if you aren’t honest with me again, I won’t be the one to hurt you.  I think Noglash would be more than happy to do the honors.”

Noglash was in one of his more looming positions behind Mauhúr.  Jashit, who had been looking fairly self-satisfied at this point, facefaulted.  “Er…erm…but the terms…”

“I am well aware of the terms.  And they are binding on each of us as well.  Only I cannot vouch for Noglash’s memory on the matter.  He can be very absent-minded sometimes.  I think, in the heat of the moment, he is more likely to forget.  Isn’t that right, Noglash?”

Noglash gave the goblins a hard bright smile with all of his teeth in it.  “Oh yes.  It’s a nuisance.  Memory like a _sieve_ sometimes.”

-.-.-.-

When they had skuttled away again, though, his frown returned.  “Those crawling little cockroaches,” he said.  “Did you see that shite Jashit?  His head was swelled up like a tick!  Festering little pimple.”

“Too clever by half, I thought they were being,” said Durzlip.  “The way they seized onto those terms…”

“They were seizing an opportunity,” said Warrung.  “So would any of us in their place, I think.”

“I tend to agree with you, Warrung,” said Mauhúr.  “And there is something to be commended in it.  I would not have expected one of the snaga to take initiative like that.”

“Perhaps it is a sign of the times,” remarked Grishnákh.  As they looked at him, he gazed at Mauhúr with an unpleasant smile playing around his mouth.  “Negotiating with rabbits in the afternoon.  Haggling with snaga at night.  Did you find it so different after all, Captain Mauhúr?  But I suppose there is no connection between them…”

“Don’t pretend you’re any better, Grishnákh,” said Durzlip.  “You ate your sandwich too, as I recall.”

“I’m only saying that it sets a precedent.  The strong ought not to allow the weak to set the terms.”

“It touches me that you are so concerned on my behalf,” drawled Mauhúr.  “Perhaps one day your advice will find the audience it so deserves.  In the meantime, I think we are better served by sleep.”  Grishnákh stood.  “Don’t go out there, Grishnákh.”

“Is the great Mauhúr worried about the likes of me?” he murmured.  “But I am not leaving the tent.  I am only looking out of it.

Mauhúr gave a grudging nod, and Grishnákh pulled back a flap of the improvised tent. 

Outside he saw more than the rabble of Isengard could have imagined.  He saw the trees silver and gleaming in an Orc’s night vision, the shadows made luminous with the bodies of small animals.  Fieldmice made bright trails through the grass.  There was a pair of rabbits under a tree, and a family of foxes – the dog fox, his vixen, and four little kits – were playing nearby.  As Grishnákh watched he saw them respond to his presence: the rabbits’ ears straightened, and the young foxes ran to their mother and watched him from under the shadow of her belly. 

Spies, all.  The clearing was full of them. 

“No,” he said quietly.  “None of us are going anywhere.”

Durzlip and Noglash looked at each other and then came to the end of the tent he was at to look out as well.  Grishnákh, uninterested in the low muttering of their attempts to pick out the animals watching them (well he knew the uselessness of Uruk eyes past dusk), removed himself and found a part of the headquarters where he could lie down away from the imposing bodies of the Isengarders.  Laying his head back on his long arm, Grishnákh gazing up at the tent and thought of Mordor, and the glow of Orodruin.  The Eye of the Dark Lord rested cold and lifeless against his skin.


End file.
